Areas of Heavy Rainfall and Critical Fire Weather on Wednesday

Heavy to excessive rainfall may bring flooding to parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia Wednesday. Recently burned areas will be particularly vulnerable to flash flooding. Gusty winds and low humidity will bring critical fire weather to parts of the Northwest U.S. and central Alaska on Wednesday where Red Flag Warnings are in effect. Read More >

April 2022 Windiest on Record!

You may have noticed that it was a bit windy across the High Plains during the month of April. Many have asked "How unusual was all the wind?' and we have looked through our available climatological data to try to answer this question. Due to the way wind measurements have changed over the years, long term wind records can be difficult to establish. Using a dataset going back to 1965 NWS Goodland looked at the following criteria:

Average Daily Wind Speed (records went back to 1984)

Number of Days With Wind Gust >= 50 mph (records back to 1975)

Number of Days With Peak Sustained Winds >= 30 mph (records back to 1965)

For all three of these categories, April 2022 ranked #1.

Average Daily Wind Speed	17.7 mph
Number of Days with Wind Gust >= 50 mph	10 days
Number of Days With Peak Sustained Winds >= 30 mph	18 days

The following tables show how April 2022 compare to previous years. The top 10 values are plotted and in the case of a tie all years that reached the value are included.

Top 10 April Average Wind Speeds

Number of Days With Peak Wind Gust >= 50 mph

Number of Days With Maximum Sustained Wind Greater Than 30 mph.

What makes April of 2022 even more impressive is that April is on average the windiest month of the year, with April, March and May being the months with the highest average wind speed. The following graph courtesy of the Iowa State Mesonet

-JRM

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