Miles of Wind

Its Monday morning just after midnight and it is windy outside.  The wind woke me up and I started thinking.  Too early for that!

Just after 3am Sunday morning I was awaken by a loud beeping tone I had never heard before.  It was my new iPhone.  There is an alert system that sends warning messages to smart phones.  It was a weather alert for blizzard conditions.

I look at things in different ways.  Listening to the wind this early morning I wondered if there was a measurement called miles of wind.  A different way of looking at wind rather than miles per hour at a given place and time.

Miles of wind would measure the number of miles the wind travels going by a certain point over a period of time.  It is concept that gets some google hits.  It is simply not a weather concept that is common.  A different way of looking at wind.  Just like I have a different way of looking at money and many other things.   Looking at the same thing in a different way, a different point of view entry to the problem domain.

For example:  The windiest place around right now is the top of Mt. Bachelor ski area here in Bend.  Often it is so windy up there at about 10k feet that the lift has to be shut down.  A wind anemometer measures wind speed and there is one at the top of the mountain.  It would be interesting to know how many miles of wind pass over the top of Mt. Bachelor every year.

Easy to produce the miles of wind number but what would it mean?  The meaning would be in its variation or trend and what caused either one of those things.

Connection to global warming?

New ways of looking at something give new information relationships.

New perspectives.

New thoughts.

Problem solutions.

Think different.

Miles of Wind!

Also called Wind Run

Wind Run
Wind run is measurement of the "amount" of wind passing the station during a given period of time, expressed in either "miles of wind" or "kilometers of wind". WeatherLink calculates wind run by multiplying the average wind speed for each archive record by the archive interval.
For Example:

Average Wind Speed = 5 mph
Archive Interval = 30 minutes (0.5 hours)
Wind Run = 5 mph x 0.5 hours = 2.5 miles of wind

A Weather Station uses a 5 minute archive interval.
Then the 5 minute archive records are totaled for the 24 hour period from midnight to midnight giving the wind run for the day in miles.
Glen Allen Wind Run Information near the Bottom of the Chart

My note from the Universe (TUT) that was received just after posting this entry to the blog:

Here's a hint on figuring out your life's purpose...

Tim, it almost never lies behind the doors marked, "Be Practical," "Get Real," or "Nothing to Fear"! 



There is a third dimension to wind travel and that is the wind traveling miles in a 360 degree circle from the point of measurement.  This dimension might be graphically measured by a polar plot displaying travel during a period  of time.