Wind climatologies are often a complex topic to explore due to the multi-dimensional nature of the weather variable. While variables like temperature and humidity have single point-in-time values, wind can be characterized by both its magnitude of speed and the direction the air is travelling. As such, there is no simple and fully correct in all cases method to compute a climatology. For example, consider one report of a 10 mph wind from the north followed by another report of a 10 mph wind from the south. What's the average wind in this case? Vector averaging yields a value of zero! A more intuitive answer is that the average wind speed was 10 mph, but what was the average wind direction in this case? The featured chart presents the daily wind speed climatologies for Des Moines using the vector components for the top panel and the simple wind speed magnitude average for the bottom. Both panels show interesting aspects of the wind climatology including a clear annual cycle for wind speed. The component climatology for the top panel nicely shows the annual cycle flip between more northerlies vs southerlies and vice versa for easterlies and westerlies.

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Tags:   wind