Question:
I was wondering how do you read this graph? Is there a database for wind direction over a year (wind rose or something) for Harlow in Essex? and final question what’s the difference between a climate and a microclimate and how do I find the latter?
Answer:
I did a reverse image search on Google to find a description of the chart. This is a plot of the percentage of hours in which the mean (average) wind direction is from each of the four cardinal wind directions, excluding hours in which the average wind speed is less than 0 m/s. It appears that the prevailing wind direction in Feb-Jun is from the north (northerly flow) and some NE, while Oct-Jan appears to come mainly from the South and West.
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Personally, I’m more familiar with windroses like I’ve attached below – where it’s clear that the prevailing winds are from the E, ESE, SE.
As an American meteorologist, I’m not familiar with publicly available data in Europe and Canada (Harlow in Essex is in the UK?). Doing a quick Google search on Met Office data, I found windroses for airports across England: https://www.
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You may want to search climate data from the Met Office like this:Â https://digital.nmla.
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Climate refers to the long-term (at least 30 years) weather patterns over an area, while a microclimate is usually a small geographical area that is statistically different from the nearby climate when it comes to precipitation, temperatures, and/or wind. In the US, we talk about many wine-producing regions being microclimates – some vineyards experience cooler temperatures high on a hill, changing the characteristics of the grape as compared with the same grape variety grown in a valley vineyard. Examples of microclimates in the UK are displayed at MetLink: https://www.metlink.
