  We determine distributions and correlation properties of offshore wind speeds
and wind speed increments by analyzing wind data sampled with a resolution of
one second for 20 months at different heights over the sea level in the North
Sea. Distributions of horizontal wind speeds can be fitted to Weibull
distributions with shape and scale parameters varying weakly with the vertical
height separation. Kullback-Leibler divergences between distributions at
different heights change with the squared logarithm of the height ratio.
Cross-correlations between time derivates of wind speeds are long-term
anticorrelated and their correlations functions satisfy sum rules.
Distributions of horizontal wind speed increments change from a tent-like shape
to a Gaussian with rising increment lag. A surprising peak occurs in the left
tail of the increment distributions for lags in a range $10-200\,{\rm km}$
after applying the Taylor's hypothesis locally to transform time lags into
distances. The peak is decisive in order to obtain an expected and observed
linear scaling of third-order structure functions with distance. This suggests
that it is an intrinsic feature of atmospheric turbulence.
