Weather Whys; Wind Rose

This is weather-wise. Many of the tools and methods of analysis that meteorologists use have names which are at best quite a mouthful. Words like anemometer, adiapat, and psychrometer can sound somewhat forbidding to the new student of the atmospheric sciences. Fortunately, not all the names are so unfamiliar. In fact, there's one tool which climatologists create and use quite a bit, which also has one of the most poetic sounding names in meteorology. It's called a wind rose. A wind rose is a diagram that clearly shows the prevailing winds that affect an area. Imagine a picture of a compass drawn on a piece of paper. Lines extend outward from the center of the picture toward every compass point. That's how a wind rose looks. It has lines extending from its center in every direction, and the length of each line depends on the amount of time the wind blows from the direction indicated.

For instance, if city A frequently has winds coming from the southwest and winds out of the south less often, the line pointing toward the southwest compass point will be longer than the line extending toward the south. When you draw a line around the wind rose, connecting the ends of all the other lines a pattern usually emerges. The longest lines will often create a shape that looks a lot like a rabbit ear extending from one side of the drawing. That shape is called a lobe. The largest lobe of the drawing indicates the general direction the wind most often comes from in that area. It may even take on a shape something like an airplane propeller if the wind almost always comes from either of two opposite directions. Otherwise is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation and is a service of the University of Oklahoma. But otherwise, I'm Drew Barlow.