Wind in Edmonton Part 3: How windy is windy?

Earlier in our epic look at Wind in Edmonton we saw that Environment Canada records two types of wind data:

• Hourly windspeed
• From Environment Canada: "The average speed during the one-, two- or ten-minute period ending at the time of observation."
• Daily speed of maximum gusts
• From Environment Canada: "The gust is the maximum or peak instantaneous or single reading from the anemometer (the instrument used to observe wind speed) during the day. The duration of a gust typically corresponds to an elapsed time of 3 to 5 seconds."

 Today we are going to take a closer look at what those actually look like.

Here the hourly windspeeds are in blue and orange. The recorded windspeeds stretch from 0 to 87km/h, but they become pretty rare after about 30km/h. Only 4% of our hours are 30km/h or more, 0.8% are 40km/h or more, and 0.1% are 50km/h or more.

The hourly windspeeds are centred around 13km/h, which matches what we saw in Parts 1 & 2.

The daily gusts are shown in pink. They stretch from 30km/h to 146km/h, although to keep things simple this chart cuts them off at 100km/h. Most of the gusts are clustered in the 30-50km/h range, and they start to taper off over about 60km/h. 

We will take a closer look at the windiest hours and the gustiest days later in this series.

Weird Data

There are a few fun quirks in the data to point out:

• From 1953-1975 neither station recorded windspeeds of 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 20, 22, 25, 28 or 30km/h. There are 0 records during those two decades for those windspeeds.
• From 1980-2020 things sort of reversed, and 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26 & 28km/h were all recorded nearly 10x more frequently than their neighbours.

So it's not quite the odd numbers, and it's not quite the even numbers. Once the numbers flip the end result is that neither station has recorded very many hours at either 12km/h or 25km/h (two notable gaps in the first chart from today).

And also, in this second chart Blatchford's recorded gusts are much lower than the International's because the data is missing for 1995-2015.

Continued in Part 4: How many windy days do we get each year?