Windy Spring In Utah

I noticed a lot of people on social media were complaining about the weather, more so about how windy it had been here in Utah this Spring. It did seem unusually windy in the beehive state during the Spring months, especially during the months of May and June. This sparked my interest so I decided to do some digging to see what I could find out.

Finding archived wind data turned out to be pretty difficult. The National Weather Service office here in Salt Lake City does not keep any daily wind data records. After searching the web however, I was able to find some archived wind records for Salt Lake City from NOAA's National Centers For Environmental Information webpage https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search. One data set in particular had daily wind observations for Salt Lake City that stretched all the way back to the year 1997. This data set consists of the fastest daily wind speed that was observed at the SLC Airport. I was hoping to find the fastest daily wind gusts observed but fastest daily sustained wind speed worked out just fine.

 First, I broke the data set up into years, then I separated it by months. Because May and June seemed unusually windy for this year, I broke the data up into those two months, then I averaged out the daily fastest wind speeds over those two month periods for each year. In the end I found some interesting results.

May and June of 2022 turned out to be the windiest May/June period in SLC in the last 17 years. The next closet comparable years are 2020 and 2005. Its important to note that the wind data used to make this graph includes wind speeds from all directions.

Given that it was also windy in the southern portions of Utah, I decided to see if I could find some wind data for the St. George area. Unfortunately, the same data set for a reliable point in the St. George area was only available for the past 3 years. Cedar City airport had records going all the way back to 1998 so I decided to use that to represent southern Utah. The result for Cedar City was dramatically different, in that 2021 had a windier May/June period. In fact, the past 3-years combined have been the windiest on record dating back to 1998.

Overall, I guess its safe to say that May/June were usually windy in here Utah, and if you live in southern Utah, the past 3 May/June periods were very windy.