It’s been fairly windy here in Central New York the past month and that’s prompted some e-mails into the office asking whether this is unusual.

Before I get into the numbers here is a quick overview of why the wind, in general, picks up during the winter.  In a nutshell, jet stream winds push south into the United States during the colder months.  These stronger jet stream winds are partly the ‘fuel’ for stronger areas of low pressure that track from west to east across the country. The stronger the storms the greater the pressure difference between low pressure and nearby high pressure. This leads to stronger winds during winter then we see during the warm season.

There is a limited amount of wind data that we have access to here in the office, at least on a daily basis.  It goes back to 1994.  What I did a while back was use ‘average’ wind speeds of greater than 15 mph and 20 mph as an arbitrary cut off points. These numbers are not high wind gusts but 24 hour averages so they give a good approximation of windy days in general. At least here in Syracuse it seems on the days we average greater than 20 mph we start to get tree limbs down and scattered power outages. That’s just a personal observation.  The months I included were November through March.  Here are a couple of the windier winters of recent memory

                                    Wind 15+ mph Wind 20+ mph

2005/06                       24                                5

2003/04                       23                                5

1996/97                       22                                8

2007/08                      16                                4

So, as you can see, even with the month of March still to go, we are not unusually windy by Syracuse standards over the past 15 years. By the way it looks like a windy start to March so maybe the month will follow the old saying ‘in like a lion and out like a lamb.’ One last note, The Lake Effect challenge for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society is now up to $28.25.