Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Blowin' a gale

I don't know how people live with the mistral or the tramontane down in the south of France. Those winds blow regularly and with greater force that we're seeing up here right now. But the sound of constant wind and wind gusts makes me jumpy. Maybe you get used to it.

The average winds at 7h21 this morning where we are (red dot).

Our wind comes on the edge of a weather system that is blowing in off the North Atlantic, over the British Isles and northern coast of France. It's a lot stronger up north than here, luckily for us. These systems are normal and we get them regularly, but with much less wind most of the time.

The above map shows that the average wind speed this morning where we live is around 30km/hr (just under 20mph). Another map on the same web site shows the gusts to be between 40 and 50km/hr (25 and 30mph). That's not much compared to what they're getting in northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England. But it's still annoying.

Just for fun, I converted 30km/hr into light years per hour -- the online converter has an option for light years because, well, for those times when you just need to know. Astronomically speaking, our winds are blowing very, very slowly, at 0.00000000000317106299 light years/hr. That's just slightly faster than 3 trillionths of a light year per hour.

4 comments:

  1. I agree with you--wind makes me jittery, and I can hardly wait until it stops. It's blowing a gale here in London.
    We've been in the Mistral once, in Avignon. One second, it was calm, and the next, we could hardly stand up. We drove a few miles out of the river valley, and it all stopped. I've heard the Mistral compared to SoCal's Santa Ana, but the Santa Ana seems to whip around more and cover a wider area.

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  2. Winds traveling at lightyears per hour? Oh, no, I just might have to start doing my own daily conversions. Look what you've started!

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  3. Like you, I hate wind. And here in western Scotland we get plenty of opportunities to practice our hatred. I think that this past winter has been the windiest ever. We've had about 10 wind events. But the new greenhouse at the top (and windiest part of the garden) which was strengthened with braces connecting the roof to the body) has made it through it all. We had snow showers with wind when I landed back yesterday! Can we have spring again now please?

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  4. chris, I've read about the current wind event up there. Hang out in pubs!

    mitch, lol!

    craig, I'm ready, too. Please? :)

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