This paper proposes two general procedures to develop wind speed models based on stochastic differential equations. Models are intended to generate wind speed trajectories with statistical properties similar to those observed in the wind speed historical data available for a particular location. The developed models are parsimonious in the sense that they only use the information about the marginal distribution and the autocorrelation observed in the wind speed data. Since these models are continuous, they can be used to simulate wind speed trajectories at different time scales. However, their ability to reproduce the statistical properties of the wind speed is limited to a time frame of hours since diurnal and seasonal effects are not considered. The developed models can be embedded into dynamic wind turbine models to perform dynamic studies. Statistical properties of wind speed data from two real-world locations with significantly different characteristics are used to test the developed models. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.