A Local Meshless Method for Approximating 3D Wind Fields

Abstract

n efficient, mesh-free numerical method has been developed for creating 3D wind fields using data from meteorological towers. Node points are placed within a region of interest, generally based upon topological features. Since meshless methods do not require connective mesh generation, storage is greatly reduced, permitting implementation of the code using MATLAB on a personal computer. Utilizing locally collocated nodes and radial basis functions, a 3D wind can be quickly created that satisfies mass consistency. The meshless method yields close approximations to results obtained with mesh-dependent finite-difference, finite-volume, and finite-element techniques.