Wind speeds were rather light on Sunday, which is about what is expected for the middle of August. The featured chart presents the wind speed climatology by day of the year for Ames based on period of record observations. The top panel breaks the wind direction and speed into components. The meteorological convention is to call these "u" and "v" wind speeds with "u" representing west to east motion and "v" representing south to north motion. So a given wind speed and direction can be expressed as component u and v speeds. This makes for an informative climatology as these values have intuitive implicates for the source of air masses being advected into the state. For example, the largest negative "v" values are found during the winter months and these would represent the dominance of northerly winds during the cold months. The bottom panel is a simple and smoothed average of the overall wind speed with the annual minimum found during the first half of August.

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Tags:   wind