Coastal Resource Guide Pleasant Bay and ... - Town to Chatham

Coastal Resource Guide for Pleasant Bay and Chatham HarborFigure 8. Wind data collected from a site in Orleans by the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory, UMASS, displayed as wind roses using LakesEnvironmental Software WRPLOT View previous section on outer wave climate dealt with the forcesshaping the barrier beach, this section deals with waves generatedwithin the estuarine system. As the offshore WIS stations are notsuitable for depicting wind and/or waves within Pleasant Bay, analternative station consisting solely of wind data was utilized. From2003 to 2005 data was collected to support a Wind Data Reportfor Orleans by the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (RERL)at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. This publicly availabledataset was downloaded for the resource guide and the only fullyear (2004) was extracted in order not to bias the average withseasonal trends. It should be noted that the resultant data setis comprised of only one year of data, as opposed to the twentyyears of WIS data, and therefore there is a much higher potentialfor long-term trends to be lost and for short-term perturbationsin a cycle to skew the trend. The vane (wind direction) andanemometer (wind speed) data used to generate the wind rose 12Pleasant Bay Alliance 2011