Recently, the wind has grabbed some headlines, and this has brought many questions my way.
The most common being, “Is it windier than it used to be?” There is a lot to look at when you are trying to sort out this kind of observation.
- Are the average wind speeds higher than they used to be?
- Are the average gusts higher than they used to be?
- Are the maximum gusts higher than they used to be?
These all are going to lead to slightly different answers. Let’s start with the average wind speeds.
Wind speeds are what we could consider to be the consistent wind speeds. As a trend, you can see that these have sort of dropped. The biggest wind speeds were in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The wind speeds in more recent decades have actually been lower.
If we only looked at the sustained winds, the answer would be that we are not seeing more wind events. That said, when there is a wind event, that is usually the result of gusts!
When you look at the data of average wind gusts, you can see that they have almost steadily increased over time. While the 1970s and 80s had some peaks in the data, there is a definite trend in average wind gusts from 1990 to the present…