Wind environment studies in Australia

Abstract The assessment of prospective environmental wind conditions about proposed building developments in Australia has been discussed. Assessment techniques, making use of wind tunnel studies, have been illustrated with examples from a study of two possible building configurations for a very exposed site on the north side of the City of Melbourne. A method of predicting the probability of occurrence of a given wind speed at a particular location has been detailed, and examples have been given of the integration of model measurements of local velocities with the wind speed probability distribution for the geographic area. The comparisons of these probabilistic estimates with environmental wind speed criteria have been discussed and illustrated. A method of measuring peak gust wind speeds at model scale in situations of high turbulence intensity has been given and a comparison is given with a full scale situation.