What's the prevailing wind in Sheffield?

[Tony]

I need to know the prevailing wind direction for a little project that I'm working on, but I need it accurately expressed as degrees (not just south-westerly)

 

So do any of you weather buffs know the answer?

[Heyesey]

An average that accurate wouldn't really be useful ... but I'll go try and find out. Just bear in mind that the standard deviation will probably be around 45 degrees anyway.

[Tony]

I just need the average for some calculations. A deviation margin would be useful so I can check out the variances, but it's not essential until I get into the wind tunnel

[KenH]

I can find you the links to get historic data for airfields and then you can write some code to work it out for yourself. The thing to be careful of with wind data is that it tends to be given in degrees from True North whereas everything else in life is in Magnetic degrees.

[adambaz]

Something like this for sheffield?

http://www.iac.es/weather/otdata/wind_dir.html

 

Here's one for Brighton:

http://www.piertopier.net/nport.direction.html

 

This site has accurate wind readings for local areas.

http://www.xcweather.co.uk/

 

And this site explains where on a total 360* circle each reading lands.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conMediaFile.3618

 

Helpful too:

http://climate.umn.edu/snow_fence/Components/winddirectionanddegreeswithouttable3.htm

[adambaz]

Of all places to tell you. A hotel website has the answer.

http://www2.hilton.co.uk/sisp/index.htm?fx=weather&loc_id=134756

[KenH]

Of all places to tell you. A hotel website has the answer.

http://www2.hilton.co.uk/sisp/index.htm?fx=weather&loc_id=134756

 

That just tells you the wind direction at the moment. It varies constantly.

 

The best site for general weather of this type is http://www.wunderground.com and then put in the code for the airport, which is EGSY. There is then a box to get the data for any historical date. I used to extract what are known as METARS from an online site and then use the weather data to predict call volumes, so I have the sites and the scripts somewhere. You get the data in a specific set format with an easy to read date/time format and then the wind speed in a format such as 260/10 where the 10 is the speed in knots.