Data collected from wind instrumentation installed on a 152‐meter meteorological tower located on White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, are analyzed to determine gustiness characteristics during both unstable and very stable regimes. The following results are indicated: an increase in gust factors occurs as the air‐mass instability becomes greater and as the mean wind‐speed time averaging period is enlarged; however a decrease in gust factors is associated with an increase in height and wind speed and with the extension of the peak wind‐speed averaging interval. Also, estimates of gust factors to a height of 152 meters are obtained for different averaging times and stability conditions by introducing a known gust factor value at 15.3 meters and a computed constant into a simple power‐law expression.

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Wind profiles derived from tracking 100‐gram balloons and Jimspheres were subjected to power spectral analysis to determine the frequencies corresponding to instrumental noise, self‐induced balloon oscillations, and the wind profile. In this analysis a smoothing technique using a truncated Fourier series effectively filtered out the unwanted part of the spectrum without attenuating the desired part. Sample wind profiles showing the effect of using a 17‐point binomial smoothing, as well as truncated Fourier smoothing, are presented.

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