Winds were gusty on Tuesday and not necessarily from a direction we'd expect to see such strong winds. The featured chart summarizes Tuesday wind data from the Ames Airport in the form of a wind rose. Wind roses are a beautiful way to present frequencies of both wind speed and direction within a polar axes plot which provides a compass orientation of the reports. The trickiest aspect is the meteorological convention of showing which direction the wind was blowing from. So the bars off to the ESE are winds blowing from the east-southeast and not toward the ESE. The segments within the bars show frequencies at a given wind speed interval. Such strong winds are more common from directions more south of SE or NW as you can find with climatology wind roses available on this website.

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Tags:   windrose