Utah Windriders Association

Dimitri, and others interested in weather/history. (In response to Dimitri's question about the archives)

I am totally with you on those archives. A couple of weeks ago, because of how it seems this year the wind has been so subpar and out of total curiosity, I spent a little time assessing the wind meter data at our favorite sites over the past five years. Mesowest "past data" feature allowed me to do this in about 15 minutes. I only did Yuba and Grants, but I broke it up into the "Time Series" Graphs and the "Hodograph" versions. Hodograph version gives a very effecient overview of past wind. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodograph

This has allowed me to see in a glance just how below average this summer's wind has been. However, it also allowed me to see at a glance the best wind days over the last four to five years. Some of the data isn't very detailed before then. Or they didn't offer 30 day segments. (Many of you know about these features, some may not).

Seeing those best wind days at a glance allowed me to go back to 2005 on and match up some posts to those wind days to get a better picture of what sail sizes and windlogs went with what the windmeters reported. Also, it was pretty entertaining to go back and look at some of those posts.

The point is, whatever archives that we can restore and make sensibly accessible we will. During the big spambot/hacker episode (when we had to go to Yahoo forum status) I think there were some archives actually lost thanks to the corruption. Furthering the point of website security being an important issue for us to preserve what we have. I loved reading the more detailed posts. Some of the posts even defined the times a bit. It'll be interesting to recover if we can, the archives from around 9-11, or especially when those from when Rush was full.

Example: In 2005 approx. sept 3-6th looked pretty windy and full for a couple of days by the "past data" graphs... So went to the archives and found that it was a weekend I had at Yuba that was pretty sweet. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=601

I'll post a couple of those pdf's that I compiled. I didn't include Grantsville 2008. (and only aug-sept)

Pretty interesting analysis, Rick. I'm always wondering what other factors portend wind, like dew point, humidity, pressure, etc., at any given place. Maybe nothing to correlate, unless you can see some trending prior to a big wind event. G'ville is so interesting since it's such a little laboratory, affected I think by fairly local conditions (depth of snowpack above creating downslope winds?) coupled with the mid-level flow. Would be fun to find a magic predictor. Correlating two things together, like G'ville and Black Crook might be neat, if you can grab the data somehow.

By the way, thanks Josh, for continuing to look for the archives. There are some neat tales in there and I'd hate to lose them since they've got some of the early stoke of the club, including epic wind drives, big days, and some hilarious stories.