Longtime viewer and Pueblo resident Richard emailed me a question earlier this week about changes in our wind patterns. He asked: Is it my imagination, or does Pueblo have more windy days than it used to?
A good way to look at strong wind events is by looking at high wind warning days. They are issued in Pueblo for wind gusts at 58 miles per hour or more. Between 2005 and 2023, the National Weather Service issued high wind warnings in Pueblo County nearly 5 days per year.
For comparison, in this same period, the NWS issued a high wind warning anywhere in southern Colorado around 10 and a half days a year. As you can see, it's clear there's been more of these events in the last several years.
I spoke to the National Weather Service Pueblo office today, and we don't have a long enough period of data yet to draw firm conclusions on whether there has been an increase in strong wind events. In science, we need datasets to be a certain length to perform proper statistical analysis on them. Twenty years is a long time but not in the context of climate data. Some of our large-scale weather patterns, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation...vary on the span of decades. For the entire period in which we have high wind warning data saved at the county level...that index has been negative. This makes it difficult to figure out whether a possible increase in strong wind events is specifically a climate change issue, or related to changes in teleconnections.
The average wind speed by year is impressively consistent. In the last 20 years, the average wind speed remained between seven point four and eight point four miles per hour.
Let's also check on the wind direction of the strongest wind gust each year. From 2014 to 2018, the strong gust was either out of the north or north-northeast. From 2019 to 2023, the strongest gust has been out of the west or northwest - with one exception.
Because of Colorado's topography, the direction the wind blows from plays a major role in how your home gets impacted. So if you're on the west side of town, you'll probably get hit harder by a wind out of the west. If you're on the east side, you'll get hit harder by a wind from the east.
So I am seeing a trend of stronger wind events, but more time and data is needed to draw a firm conclusion. If you have a weather question you want answered, you can email us here!
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