Use of wind speed data is of great importance in civil engineering, especially in structural and coastal engineering applications. Synthetic data generation techniques are used in practice for cases where long wind speed data are required. In this study, a new wind speed data generation scheme based upon wavelet transformation is introduced and compared to the existing wind speed generation methods namely normal and Weibull distributed independent random numbers, the first- and second-order autoregressive models, and the first-order Markov chain. Results propose the wavelet-based approach as a wind speed data generation scheme to alternate the existing methods. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.