Measuring Windy Weather

The gale continued to blow for most of the day again on Sunday and it was into the evening before it started to calm down. Once again it was mild but not very pleasant outside.

It set me off thinking how to measure the windy weather. It’s all well and good measuring the highest gust speed that’s just one measurement and the last gale blew for the best part of 3 days. So with a little help from the “Countif” function in Excel I decided to calculate how many wind gust speeds in increasing 5mph bands my weather station recorded from January 2011 to the present.

I was surprised by the numbers but they do show how windy the last couple of months have been. I have even checked the 590 roughly manually and it seems correct.

Our strongest gust was in February 2011 with a speed of 36 mph during a particularly windy spell that month. But for pure persistent blowing power December 2011 and January 2012 hold the record.

For information my weather station saves all its weather data in 5 minute intervals so a wind gust speed is logged every 5 minutes or 288 gust speeds a day, 2016 per week, amounting to just over 8000 values per month. So all Excel has done is count up the wind gust speed in each of the 5 minute intervals.