I grew up thinking that
Grande Prairie was one of the windiest places on earth. Then I moved to Lethbridge. Upon returning to GP, my perspective has changed
dramatically! Now, when I hear people
talk about how windy it is here, I get a little perturbed. So I thought I'd do a little digging to see
how windy Grande Prairie really is...empirically. Here's what I've found:
When you look at
Environment Canada's data on the windiest cities in Canada (out of the 82 most
populous cities), Grande Prairie is ranked 67th with an average daily wind
speed of only 11.25 km/h. Every other
city in Alberta, other than Fort MacMurray, is windier than us according to
this measure. Average wind speed is only
one measure though, so let's look at another.
If you look at the number
of days a city gets with wind speeds of 5 km/h or less, Grande Prairie ranks
11th with an astounding 318 days (87% of the year!) Out of Alberta cities, only Fort Mac gets
more of these peaceful days (only 0.63 of a day more though!) Lethbridge only gets 243 of these days (67%
of year) while poor old Gander, Nfld gets a measly 124 (34% of year).
So by these two measures
Grande Prairie is looking pretty good.
So where does this idea come from that Grande Prairie is so windy? I think the answer lies in one final stat:
Looking at the number of
days with wind speeds of over 40 km/h, Grande Prairie ranks 31st with an
average of 33 days per year. So while GP
is generally a pretty calm place, when the wind does blow, it blows hard. As an aside, I've heard that this is one of the
reasons that we don't have any commercial wind farms up here. Wind farms operate best with constant, steady
winds and Grande Prairie's wind spikes are not conducive to their operations.
In any case, I guess you could say
GP is windy in the sense that we get bouts of really windy days. However, in comparing to other places in
Alberta, we aren't quite that bad. While
we double Edmonton's 15 days of 40+ km/h winds, we have only half as many as
Calgary (66 days) and pale in comparison to Lethbridge who has a whopping 115
days.
In sum, I think we can safely
say that Grande Prairie is not the wind magnet it's often made out to be. Personally, I would rather have lots of calm
days with a few really windy ones than to have windy days all year long.
I hope this was somewhat
informative, even if it just informed you that Rory is a major nerd who has no
qualms with blogging about the weather.
I would appreciate any comments you may have!
All stats can be found on
Environment Canada's site here: http://www.climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/winners/intro_e.html.
