• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.63 no.6
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• pp.809-824
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• 2017

The accurate evaluation of wind characteristics and wind-induced structural responses during a typhoon is of significant importance for bridge design and safety assessment. This paper presents an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm-based angular-linear approach for probabilistic modeling of field-measured wind characteristics. The proposed method has been applied to model the wind speed and direction data during typhoons recorded by the structural health monitoring (SHM) system instrumented on the arch Jiubao Bridge located in Hangzhou, China. In the summer of 2015, three typhoons, i.e., Typhoon Chan-hom, Typhoon Soudelor and Typhoon Goni, made landfall in the east of China and then struck the Jiubao Bridge. By analyzing the wind monitoring data such as the wind speed and direction measured by three anemometers during typhoons, the wind characteristics during typhoons are derived, including the average wind speed and direction, turbulence intensity, gust factor, turbulence integral scale, and power spectral density (PSD). An EM algorithm-based angular-linear modeling approach is proposed for modeling the joint distribution of the wind speed and direction. For the marginal distribution of the wind speed, the finite mixture of two-parameter Weibull distribution is employed, and the finite mixture of von Mises distribution is used to represent the wind direction. The parameters of each distribution model are estimated by use of the EM algorithm, and the optimal model is determined by the values of $R^2$ statistic and the Akaike's information criterion (AIC). The results indicate that the stochastic properties of the wind field around the bridge site during typhoons are effectively characterized by the proposed EM algorithm-based angular-linear modeling approach. The formulated joint distribution of the wind speed and direction can serve as a solid foundation for the purpose of accurately evaluating the typhoon-induced fatigue damage of long-span bridges.