I'm building a reader for a Davis 6410 anemometer and have my setup working nicely to read the device reliably. I'm trying to figure out the best way to report the data that's most consistent with real weather stations. I could set it up to read "instantaneous" wind speed, running 2-5 second averages, and much longer averages.
I found
this paper which says:
...in the ASOS network in the USA, wind gusts are recorded as the maximum 5-s average of wind speed during the past 10-min period preceding the time of observation. At the same time, the averaging time for the mean wind speed is 2 min instead of 10 min. Moreover, wind gusts are reported only if the highest gust during the past 10 min exceeds the 2-min mean wind speed by at least three knots, given that the mean wind speed is greater than two knots, and the highest gust exceeds the minimum five-second wind speed during past 10 min by 10 knots or more.
Based on this alone my conclusion is that I'd do a running 2 minute average for reporting mean wind speed and then report gust speeds as the highest 5 second average every 10 minutes. I'm just curious if anyone has further insight as to the "standard" way to report wind speed and gusts.
