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email thisA few months back I found a great site on wind energy. Having installed a wind generator on Mom's house and even attempted to build one from scratch (funny story, another time maybe) I was really interested to see what the "big boys" do. This Wind Rose caught my attention. It's a clever graphing mechanism which shows not only where the wind blows from but also where most of the power or force is coming from. Here's a snippet from their description:
The radius of the 12 outermost, wide wedges gives the relative frequency of each of the 12 wind directions, i.e. how many per cent of the time is the wind blowing from that direction.
The second wedge gives the same information, but multiplied by the average wind speed in each particular direction. The result is then normalised to add up to 100 per cent. This tells you how much each sector contributes to the average wind speed at our particular location.
The innermost (red) wedge gives the same information as the first, but multiplied by the cube of the wind speed in each particular location. The result is then normalised to add up to 100 per cent. This tells you how much each sector contributes to the energy content of the wind at our particular location.
I've been collecting weather statistics at our house for years now, mostly out of curiousity about the viability of a wind generator. This Wind Rose seems like an ideal tool but none of the weather programs seem to offer it. Procrastinate, procrastinate, and then finally I sat down one night and wrote a PHP script for gathering the data, another for displaying it, and yet another for storing our weather data into a database. Move it all from my OSX box to the jerryrig servers (a Linux box somewhere out there) and...no joy, the servers don't have the latest version of the GD graphics library.
What follows is a few weeks straight from an Abbot & Costello movie...
Me: please install new GD 2.x library. open ticket
Them: that would mean change. Let us know if you need it. close ticket
Me: yes, I'd like to have it, open ticket
Them: ok, someday we'll do it. close ticket
...couple of weeks pass...
Me: can we leave ticket open until it's actually DONE? open ticket
Them: grumble...ticket stays open
...days pass...
Them: should be working now. close ticket
Me: nope, not working. open ticket
Me: btw, mail is now broken too. open another ticket
Them: mail fixed. close that ticket
Me: hey, the imagefilledarc now works, thanks! close ticket
So, without further ado, I'm happy to present our brand new Wind Rose...
I have two of them on our main weather page, one showing all of the data (around a month right now) and the other showing the past 24 hours. It's kind of cool.