Wind speed persistence is a measure of the mean wind speed duration over a given period of time at any location. This definition implies that wind speed persistence means a positive serial correlation in time series. The wind speed persistence provides useful information about the general climatological characteristics of the wind persisting at a given location. Therefore, wind speed persistence should be taken into account in many studies such as weather forecast, site selection for wind turbines and synthetic generation of the wind speed data. On the other hand, if wind direction information is considered together with the wind speed then this type of persistence can be used for additional purposes such as forest fires, dispersion of the air pollutants, building ventilation, etc. In this study, three different methods with some modifications of the previous methods have been applied to the wind speed data obtained from the meteorology stations located at the northwest part of Turkey. These methods are based on autocorrelation function, conditional probability and the wind speed duration curves. It has been shown that the proposed methods clearly reflect the persistence properties of the wind speed in the study area. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.