IEM Daily Feature
Monday, 26 September 2022
Monday, 26 September 2022
Relative Humidity vs Wind
Posted: 26 Sep 2022 05:30 AM
Winds were gusty over the weekend thanks to stronger contrasts in air masses over the US with a more
fall like weather pattern in place. On Sunday, these gusty winds were also helped by strong mixing of
the lower atmosphere that transports higher momentum air to the surface during the daytime. You may
have noticed the winds slacking after the stabilization of the atmosphere after sunset Sunday evening.
This mixing of air aloft tends to also decrease humidity levels as near ground surface moisture is
diluted with drier air. So it stands to reason that relative humidity would decrease as surface winds
increase as is nicely shown by the featured chart of average relative humidity by wind speed during
September for Des Moines. You may wonder though why values start bouncing around and even
increasing with around 25 knot wind speeds and higher? This is due to a smaller sample size that is
dominated by convective events (ie thunderstorms). These events will feature higher humidity values
as it is typically raining with the storms!
Voting:
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Voting:
Good = 8
Bad = 0