Alright, so I spent some time tinkering with this idea I called “windy nations”. It started pretty simply, really. I was just sitting there, looking out the window, and it was blowing a gale outside. Made me wonder, you know, which places are really windy all the time?
Getting Started
First thing I did was hop onto the computer. Thought I’d just search for “windiest countries”. Seemed easy enough. But you know how it is, you get a bunch of tourist sites or lists that don’t really explain how they know. Not what I was looking for. I wanted to see if I could figure it out myself, like a little exercise.
So, the next step was hunting for actual data. This turned out to be trickier than I thought. Lots of weather sites give you forecasts, not long-term averages for whole countries. I poked around some meteorological organizations’ websites, government data portals, that sort of thing. It was a bit of a mess.
The Process – Bits and Pieces
I managed to download a few datasets. Honestly, they were all over the place. Different formats, different ways of measuring wind, some were only for specific cities, not whole nations. It wasn’t exactly straightforward.
- Finding Data: That was the first hurdle. Took longer than I expected.
- Cleaning Data: Some files were messy. Had to try and make sense of them, maybe toss out the stuff that was obviously wrong or incomplete. I just used a basic spreadsheet program, nothing fancy.
- Defining “Windy”: This was a big one. What does “windiest” even mean? Is it the highest average speed? The most days with strong wind? The places with the biggest gusts? I realized I hadn’t even thought about that properly when I started.
I decided to focus on average annual wind speed, just to keep it simple for this practice run. Even then, getting comparable data across many countries was tough. Some places measure wind speed at 10 meters height, others higher up, especially for wind turbine data.
What Came Out Of It
In the end, I didn’t come up with a definitive, perfect list of “windy nations”. It was more complicated than a quick afternoon project allows. But I did get a feel for the process. Found some potential data sources for later, learned that standardizing weather data is a real pain.
I cobbled together a rough list based on the averages I could find and make sense of. Places like Denmark, the Netherlands, parts of the UK, New Zealand, and some specific regions in North America kept popping up. But I wouldn’t call it scientifically rigorous, not by a long shot. It was more about the doing than the final result this time.
It reminds me a bit of trying to fix that old shed door last year. Started thinking it’d be a simple hinge replacement. Ended up finding rotten wood, a warped frame… the whole job got bigger and more complicated the deeper I dug. Sometimes these little practice projects are like that, you pull one thread and find a whole tangle. Still, good practice, keeps the mind working.
