A Little Break From The Gales

Christmas Day and Boxing Day provided some relief from the constant battering from the gale force winds of the last few weeks. Of course it couldn't last and by mid evening on Boxing Day the wind was getting up again and it started to rain.

Boxing Day was cold and sunny during the day. 

Our greenhouse was still frosted over in the middle of the morning and it was the first time this winter that the bird bath needed defrosting.

Then mid evening the wind returned and has continued through the night and into Friday morning with no sign of a let up. The forecast is for the gale force winds to continue all day.

I don’t know how the weather forecasters measure how windy a month has been other than to quote maximum wind speeds but that doesn't really give any details of how many windy days there’s been. So here’s my method. My weather station records wind gust speeds and it’s possible using the data output from this and then some manipulation in an Excel spreadsheet to produce a chart showing how many gusts at particular speeds have been recorded. 

For ease of comparisons between years all Decembers values from 2011 to 2013 are plotted next to one another. It turns out December and January are our windiest months of the year with January 2012 taking the unwanted number one position. There’s still a few days to go but it’s clear that not only have we had lots of windy days this month but that the gusts have also been the strongest I've recorded with 3 gusts in the 36-40 mph range. December 2010 was an exception with very little wind but that turned out to be one of the coldest December's on record.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett