Short-term wind speed forecasting is of great importance for wind farm operations and the integration of wind energy into the power grid system. Adaptive and reliable methods and techniques of wind speed forecasts are urgently needed in view of the stochastic nature of wind resource varying from time to time and from site to site. This paper presents a robust two-step methodology for accurate wind speed forecasting based on Bayesian combination algorithm, and three neural network models, namely, adaptive linear element network (ADALINE), backpropagation (BP) network, and radial basis function (RBF) network. The hourly average wind speed data from two North Dakota sites are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results indicate that, while the performances of the neural networks are not consistent in forecasting 1-h-ahead wind speed for the two sites or under different evaluation metrics, the Bayesian combination method can always provide adaptive, reliable and comparatively accurate forecast results. The proposed methodology provides a unified approach to tackle the challenging model selection issue in wind speed forecasting. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.