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Revisiting the Australian/New Zealand standard for wind actions (AS/NZS 1170.2:2011): Do current wind standards sufficiently capture local wind climates?

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conference contribution
posted on 2025-05-09, 16:59 authored by Andrew MageeAndrew Magee, Anthony KiemAnthony Kiem
The Australian/New Zealand Standard for Wind Actions (AS/NZS 1170.2:2011) provides advice on wind direction multipliers (Md), regional wind speeds (VR), and other relevant considerations to assist in designing and building structures. AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 identify eight individual wind regions for Australia, with regionally specific Md and VR values which can be applied to calculate the directional wind speed. Given the vast expanse of Australia and various wind hazards in both cyclonic and non-cyclonic wind areas, it is essential to accurately quantify current and future wind risk that is representative of the local wind climate. As such, this study compares the Md component of the AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 standards for four wind regions (A1, A4, B and C), with observed wind data (4 stations per wind region) - see Figure 1 for more details. Findings suggest that the wind regions analysed do not adequately represent the wind climates of the stations considered within each wind region. For example, while AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 assume that the same directional wind multipliers should apply for Perth and Adelaide, we show that the prevailing direction of the strongest wind gusts (≥99.9th percentile) varies considerably between stations. Using station data to model Md suggests that AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 can underestimate wind risk for region A1 (70% of cases) and overestimate between 62-77% of cases for regions A4, B and C. These results highlight some inadequacies with AS/NZS 1170.2:2011 and suggests more regionally-specific wind direction multipliers that are more indicative of local wind climates are required.

History

Source title

MODSIM2019: Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation

Name of conference

23rd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM2019)

Location

Canberra, Australia

Start date

2019-12-01

End date

2019-12-06

Pagination

795-801

Publisher

Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand

Language

  • en, English

College/Research Centre

Faculty of Science

School

School of Environmental and Life Sciences

Rights statement

These proceedings are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you attribute MSSANZ and the original author(s) and source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. Images or other third party material are included in this licence, unless otherwise indicated in a credit line to the material.

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