The steady growth in the utilisation of wind power for electricity generation has led to increased interest in methods for synthetically generating wind speeds that are able to more accurately determine the site potential. The aim of this work is to develop a parametric model for generating hourly wind speed, that uses readily available aggregate statistical data, such as mean and maximum monthly or yearly wind speeds. The model has been validated using wind speed measurements collected during an experimental campaign at a site in Italy. To assess performance differences with respect to an already established methodology, the series of wind speeds generated with the proposed approach has been compared with that obtained using the Markov chains method. Various comparison criteria have been considered, including the overall statistical parameters, distribution function, autocorrelation, and power spectral density. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.