Doesn’t it seem like it’s been windier than normal over the past couple of months? It sure does to me and anybody else I’ve talked to about it.
That query was put to the National Weather Service folks in Gray, maine, who cover Maine and most of New Hampshire. They crunched the long-term data for Concord Municipal Airport, the official NWS site in the state, and found …
The basic trends are similar for Concord as those of Portland, with March being less windy than normal, April being near normal, and May so far being above normal.
Ah, well. So much for casual perception. The April chart is shown above.
May has been very windy so far, as the chart below shows. Perhaps we’re just experience recency bias – the way whatever happened most recently overwhelms our memory of events that happened previously.
Return to the Concord Monitor
The wind blows all the time at my house! I can’t count how many times I’ve heard that by people thinking about installing a power generating windmill. Humans are really lousy at data gathering. We remember when the wind blows but we don’t remember those many quiet days when the wind isn’t blowing. Absence of sensory input is simply not noted or remembered. We always recommended a full year of accurate wind recording by a recorder to get real data. To make a windmill worthwhile, we need around 12 mph annual average. Most places here in New Hampshire range around 3 to 4 mph. Solar panels make a lot more sense.
The winds have been more turbulent in the last few years, ai least where I am, in Camden. At any speed, this wind doesn’t just blow through in on direction, but twist and rolls. sending the tree tops swirling, while the next tree over is still. It dries out the forest floor and the topsoil of the garden beds, even if they have been doused with rain, which is hard on young seedlings and makes for forest fire risk. Serious business this wind.
I’m an arborist. Worked outside all my life. I live and die by the weather. It seems to me that the number of days that I would not climb a tree due to wind has increase significantly.
The National Weather Service just posted data showing that this year has been slightly less windy than normal – however, “windy” isn’t an exact term. Their data is average wind speed, so it could be that we are having more very windy days (which would keep you out of the tree) that are balanced by more still days, creating an average speed that doesn’t reflect changes in extremes.
I would like to see an update to this article since it only examined a couple months in 2020. The last year as a whole–from April 2020 to March 2021–has seemed extremely windy on a regular basis. Could you please compare the prior year and see if your above statements hold true? Or could you please let me know where I can find out as much?
I live in the woods. In a house. And the number of branches I’ve had to pick up this last year or two has been higher. I used to be arare occurrence and it’s pretty common now. I def would need to see data for a longer period and a larger area