Map of prevalent winds in North America

June 7, 2011 10:26 AM

Map of prevalent winds in North America
Curious which way the wind blows? Here's a map of historical winds in California and here's a detailed view of Honolulu. WindHistory is an interactive web map that shows wind roses for 2500 stations in North America. Built with SVG, Polymaps, and D3.

Role: creator

posted by Nelson (8 comments total)

This is very cool, and confirms my suspicion that the wind in Chicago just goes any damn direction it wants. The meaning of the percentage in the center of the diagrams isn't particularly transparent, but this is apparently not your fault.
posted by theodolite at 2:49 PM on June 7, 2011

Fantastic. Oddly enough, I first saw this via the ForeFlight twitter stream. It would be sweet to have maps of winds aloft based on sounding data, or the RUC model - I'm not a fan of FB winds.
posted by exogenous at 5:50 PM on June 9, 2011

This is quite interesting. One thing I wondered about was whether it would be possible to show daily or seasonal patterns. Maybe a slider bar that says "see how they change during the day" or something? (I don't even know if the data is available.)
posted by salvia at 11:47 PM on June 11, 2011

Thanks for the comments! I added a bit of explanation for the calm winds in the center, and I have a month-of-year slider planned.

exogenous: there's some excellent winds aloft maps at ADDS. It's really a different dataset, being much broad a model.
posted by Nelson at 2:58 PM on June 12, 2011

This is great! As part of a plan to do some river sailing, I have been looking for wind info for towns in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Perfect!
posted by Tchad at 6:22 AM on June 16, 2011

I just updated my site. You can now filter by month, so you can easily see how the wind shifts over the course of the year.
posted by Nelson at 11:52 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Fun! I like the "play" button as well.
posted by salvia at 12:41 AM on September 13, 2011

This related map of winds is kind of pretty.
posted by exogenous at 8:45 AM on February 12, 2013