Ever wonder why gusts from ASOS stations are usually lower than surrounding spotter reports/Mesonet stations during wind events? This graph from our Halibut Point anemometer tripod yesterday shows why. ASOS uses 3-sec. averages, while other hardware uses instant speed or 1-s avg.

In this case, the same max gust from our Rockport tripod yesterday of 76.4mph instantaneous was a 70.3mph 3-second average. Further compounding the difference to ASOS, not all ASOS stations monitor gusts continuously for the hourly report. Only stations with "PK WIND" METAR do.

@NWSBoston has the burden of sorting through a bunch of automated wind reports with little to no info on whether the wind is sampled properly or what averaging scales are being used. For reference, all WxFlow gusts are 3-s avgs and the CWOP spec officially requires instant gusts.

@NWSBoston It would be awesome if the CWOP spec could be extended to accept wind measurements on different averaging periods for uniformity, or at least an indication of the type of average used. Much weather station hardware does not currently obey the CWOP instantaneous spec.

@WX1BOX Given Peter's tweet and Boston's excellence on the frontier of science, we should pioneer a new wind observation standard/network which has rigorous scientific control over temporal averaging scales. The spec would require the sampling time to be indicated for any gust.