Scott Gunter

And one of the things that we're kind of expecting to see down the road with climate change is a shift in that jet stream to maybe be further north that would suggest maybe that in time it would become less windy here.

just like places further south.

So the positioning of the jet stream is very important in terms of driving these synoptic windstorms.

So overall, wind is very dependent upon larger atmospheric circulations where wind speed maybe increases for a few decades and then maybe decreases a little bit.

And so it's hard to tell if that is a long-term trend or maybe a shorter decadal trend, multi-seasonal trend that often shows up in climate data.

And I will give Barry full props for using almost what we call a climate normal, which is a 30-year period.

And so the longer that you can stretch out that period –

the better that you can understand some of these trends and see whether or not this is long-term, like climate scale, or is this a short-term weather phenomenon such as maybe the effects of El Nino or La Nina or something like that that is causing kind of some of these spikes that affect the trend.

I probably would have come to the same conclusion.

It looks like the more recent years have had a greater number of wind speeds above specific thresholds.

Correct.

Yeah, lower intensity winds.

And I thought that was really kind of a clever way of looking at that because meteorologists, we're usually focused on extremes.

And a lot of the research suggests that extreme winds, there hasn't been much change through time in the eastern part of the U.S.

And so this was really kind of interesting to see those lower wind speed thresholds.

And I am not sure how much that's been explored in

the literature and, you know, from a peer-reviewed perspective.

Right.

There has been...

maybe an arguable uptick in some of the sustained winds.