How windy was it in St. Andrews yesterday?
19 July 2015
It was exceptionally windy. I don't have data specifically for St. Andrews, but I was able to find data from RAF Leuchars, just across the Eden Estuary from the Old Course at St. Andrews.
I downloaded (from Weather Underground, as described here), the daily wind speed data for every July day since 1 July 1996. That is, 607 July days from the start of July in 1996 through 18 July 2015. Twenty years of July days.
In these 607 days, yesterday had the highest mean daily wind speed, 42 km/h, by a wide margin. In fact, the next closest day had average wind speed of 32 km/h.
For the maximum sustained wind speed, which I think is the average across a 2 minute period, there were only three July days, out of the past 607, which exceeded the 55 km/h of yesterday.
For the maximum wind gust, not every day has a record for that. For the days with a maximum wind gust record, there was only a single July day exceeding the 80 km/h gust of yesterday.
These box plots below show all the data. The mean wind speed, maximum sustained wind speed, and maximum wind gust speed for 18 July 2015 are shown as red triangles.
These data, from the most recent twenty years, show that the wind speeds of 18 July 2015 were extraordinary.
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