wind rose

wind rose

[′win ‚drōz]

(meteorology)

A diagram in which statistical information concerning direction and speed of the wind at a location may be summarized; a line segment is drawn in each of perhaps eight compass directions from a common origin; the length of a particular segment is proportional to the frequency with which winds blow from that direction; thicknesses of a segment indicate frequencies of occurrence of various classes of wind speed.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Wind Rose

 

a graph representing wind conditions at a given location; usually constructed for a month, season, or year, using data gathered over many years. The values of the recurrence of directions (as a percentage of the total number of observations) or of the average and maximum wind speeds corresponding to each rhumb are plotted to scale along eight or 16 rhumbs in the form of vectors. The ends of the vectors are joined by a line.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

wind rose

A diagram for a given location showing the relative frequency and the velocity of the wind from a selected compass direction.
A wind rose indicates how wind speed and directions are typically distributed at a particular location. Presented in a circular format, the wind rose shows the frequency of winds blowing from particular directions. The length of each “spoke” around the circle is related to the frequency of time that the wind blows from a particular direction. Each concentric circle represents a different frequency, emanating from zero at the center to increasing frequencies at the outer circles. The wind roses shown here contain additional information, in that each spoke is broken down into discrete frequency categories that show the percentage of time that winds blow from a particular direction and at certain speed ranges. All wind roses shown here use 16 cardinal directions, such as north (N), NNE, NE, etc. This rose shows that the winds at this particular location in April blow from the northwest much of the time. In fact, the 3 spokes around the northwest direction (WNW, W, and NNW) comprise 50% of all hourly wind directions.

An Illustrated Dictionary of Aviation Copyright © 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved