Hold onto your hat. On some parts of this planet, the wind does not just blow gently through the trees or cool you down on a hot afternoon. It rips across oceans, slams into coastlines, howls through mountain peaks, and spins into monstrous tornadoes reaching 300 miles per hour.
But determining the windiest place on Earth is not as simple as it sounds. Places with fast average wind speeds rarely experience the strongest gusts. And besides, gusts are recorded both at ground level and high in the sky during tornadoes.
So the word “windy” has a rather complicated definition. Nevertheless, some places on Earth have built their entire identities around their blustery reputations.
From coastal Newfoundland to the capital of Azerbaijan, from the United States Midwest to the icy shores of Antarctica, the world’s windiest places are fascinating, extreme, and sometimes dangerous environments that tell us a lot about how geography, ocean currents, and weather systems shape our planet.
Interesting, right?
The Windiest Cities
Wellington, New Zealand is often called the world’s windiest city. The city sits in a perfect position for powerful westerly winds called the Roaring Forties, named because Wellington is located between 40 and 50 degrees south of the equator.
Gale-force winds rip across the Pacific Ocean and become compressed by the narrow Cook Strait before hitting the city’s shore. On the ground, average annual wind speeds range from 5.5 to 11.5 miles per hour.
But on nearby Mount Kaukau, the average jumps to 27.3 miles per hour. The strongest gust ever recorded in Wellington reached 125 miles per hour on that same hill. Despite the constant battering, Wellington has embraced its windy identity.
The city harnesses wind energy for clean electricity and even has a famous waterfront statue called Solace in the Wind, depicting a human figure leaning into the breeze.
Halfway around the world, Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, has been called the City of Winds since ancient times. Persian texts once described it as the city of pounding wind. From about June to April, wind speeds average more than 11 miles per hour.
Baku’s breezes come from two different sources. Cold winds blow in from the Caspian Sea, sometimes reaching gale force. Warmer winds move overland into the city from the opposite direction.
Nothing blocks these gusts because Baku sits 92 feet below sea level, completely open to whatever the wind brings. Interestingly, despite the city’s air pollution problem, the consistent winds help clear the air regularly.
Saint John’s, Newfoundland in Canada earns its own collection of weather superlatives. Its average annual wind speed tops 13 miles per hour, and gusts exceeding 30 miles per hour occur on almost 50 days out of every year.
This earned it the title of windiest city in Canada. Saint John’s is also one of the foggiest, cloudiest, rainiest, and snowiest major Canadian cities. While wind chills during winter can be brutal, the city claims to have the third most temperate climate in all of Canada, after Vancouver and Victoria.
Record-Breaking Gusts
Some of the most extreme winds on Earth occur not in cities but on mountain peaks, where there are no buildings or trees to slow the air down. Mount Washington in New Hampshire, USA, stood as the world record holder for the strongest recorded wind gust for most of the 20th century.
In 1934, instruments on this 6,000-foot peak recorded a gust of 231 miles per hour. That record was eventually broken, but Mount Washington remains the windiest place in the United States.
Its average annual wind speed of 35 miles per hour seems modest until you learn that the summit experiences hurricane-force winds exceeding 75 miles per hour on more than 100 days every year.
The White Mountains sit at the intersection of several major storm tracks. Cold air from the Atlantic and warm air from inland America collide near these peaks, creating the violent wind conditions that have made Mount Washington famous.
Scotland holds a similarly impressive windy reputation. The country ranks as the windiest in Europe, with average wind speeds between 10 and 18 miles per hour. Some coastal areas experience 25 days of gale-force winds per year.
The strongest winds occur during winter when powerful depressions form over the Atlantic and push rapidly toward the British Isles. Scotland has taken advantage of its blustery weather, becoming something of a wind power pioneer and generating significant amounts of clean energy from wind turbines scattered across its landscape.
The Extremes
Antarctica holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest katabatic wind ever recorded. A katabatic wind is a wind that travels downhill from a high elevation toward the coast.
In 1912, instruments at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay recorded a katabatic wind reaching 168 miles per hour. The region’s annual average daily maximum wind speed is 44 miles per hour, which qualifies as gale force.
Antarctica’s geography is largely responsible for these extreme winds. The continent slopes downward from its high interior plateau toward the coastlines, and cold, dense air flows constantly downhill toward the sea.
These winds can create blizzard-like conditions lasting for weeks. Recording accurate wind speeds in Antarctica is notoriously difficult because instruments frequently ice up and stop working, while those designed to resist freezing sometimes blow away entirely.
Barrow Island in Western Australia currently holds the Guinness World Record for the highest wind speed not associated with a tornado. During Tropical Cyclone Olivia in 1996, an unmanned weather station on this remote island recorded a gust of 253 miles per hour.
This extraordinary measurement overthrew the previous record held by Mount Washington. Barrow Island is both a major center for oil and natural gas operations and home to a conservation reserve protecting spectacled hare wallabies, sea turtles, perentie lizards, and other rare species.
The combination of industrial activity and wildlife conservation on this tiny, extremely isolated island makes it one of the more unusual places in the world.
Most Violent Winds
While the previously mentioned records are impressive, none of them can match the raw power of tornadoes. Some of the highest wind speeds ever recorded during tornado activity occurred in Oklahoma.
A 1999 tornado near Bridge Creek, a suburb of Oklahoma City, reached approximately 300 miles per hour as measured by Doppler radar. This broke a previous record from Red Rock, Oklahoma, where a 1991 tornado reached 286 miles per hour.
Another enormous twister struck near El Reno, Oklahoma, in 2013, measuring nearly three miles wide with winds approaching 300 miles per hour.
Oklahoma sits in the heart of Tornado Alley, a region of the American Midwest where conditions frequently create violent tornadoes. Warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico moves northward and collides with cold, dry air moving southward from Canada. These clashing air masses create the powerful thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes. The flat topography of the Great Plains allows these storms to develop without the interference of mountains or hills.
Patagonia in South America shares a similar geographic exposure. Both Punta Arenas in Chile and Rio Gallegos in Argentina experience the same Roaring Forties that pound Wellington, New Zealand.
Punta Arenas is so windy that authorities have strung ropes between buildings so people have something to hold onto during extreme gusts. Winds of 80 miles per hour are not uncommon there, especially during summer months.
The wind shapes daily life in these places in ways that people living in calmer regions can barely imagine.
Sources
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
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