Correlating gusts and failures

From the last few days, we've been looking at the loss of signal from the LBA aerial #L34 and today we've correlated that with the wind-gust speeds. Although the average speed is often of interest, it is the gusts that usually determine points of failure or direct damage.

In the graph we have plotted the 10-minute gust maxima for Kilpisjärvi village and Saana mountain (the two nearest official weather stations to KAIRA). Also plotted is a vertical line showing the point at which signal was suddenly lost from LBA aerial #L34.

Not surprisingly, it corresponds to a strong peak. However it is good to note that we tolerated up to that value and that the failure did not occur earlier at lower gust speeds.

The failure time is slightly ahead of the peak. This also not surprising, as the weather stations were both downwind of the KAIRA site (by a few km) at the time of the failure.


Data courtesy from the Finnish Meteorological Institute (www.fmi.fi)