The featured chart displays daily wind speed climatology for Des Moines. Wind can be broken up into vector components. The u component is the east/west portion of the wind and the v component is the north/south portion. This component analysis is useful as the v component is primarily responsible for warm/cool air mass transport into the state. The top panel shows the daily component average wind speed and the bottom panel shows the total wind speed average. You may wonder why the magnitudes do not match well between the plots. The top panel is vector averaged, so for example a 10 mph north wind report and then a 10 mph south wind report would yield a vector average speed of 0 for both components (zero net transport). The top panel nicely shows the period each year where cool or warm air transport is the most common.

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Tags:   wind