What do You Get When You Put a Rose in the Wind? A WIndrose Plots!

Wind rose plots help see wind patterns and which way the wind blows and how hard and fast for different periods of time. Looking at different wind rose plots for the same place during different years can help determine if and how the wind patterns have changed from year to year. They can also help determine which way the wind blows mostly for a certain place.

The following shows a wind rose plot for 1988 and following that 1990 for Atlanta.

1988

1990

                           

 These two wind rose plots are two years apart, but we can see that the wind patterns have stayed relatively the same for the entire year.

Below you can see the wind rose plot for Atlanta 1990 overlaid on a google earth image of the airport. You can see visually which directions the wind moved over the actual area that the wind rose plot reports data for.