Application of Four Probability Distributions for Wind Speed Modeling

Abstract

When modeling the wind speed in some location the probability distributions are proving to be a useful tool. In this study we consider four different probability distributions: the 2-parameter Weibull, the 3-parameter Weibull, the 2-parameter Gamma and the 2-parameter Lognormal. All of them are applied on the wind speed data recorded at the airport in Dolný Hričov. Parameters of the density distributions are estimated by the maximum likelihood method. In order to select the best fitting distribution there are used the χ2−test, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, the Akaike information criterion, the Bayesian information criterion, the coefficient of determination and the root mean square error. Based on the results the 3-parameter Weibull performs as the best and the 2-parameter Weibull distribution performs as the second best.