Snow drift dynamics
Here's a puzzle for you
--- if a snow drift builds up on the south side of the trailer when
only the south and west sides are enclosed with skirting, what's the
prevailing wind direction? (Guess now --- the answer is in the next
paragraph!)
According to the
University of Wyoming,
the trailer is acting like a windbreak, allowing snow to build up on
the downwind
side of the barrier. So, during this storm at least, the winds came
from the north. (Drat!
We chose the wrong half of the trailer to enclose during our warm spell
before the next storm hit.)
Is that the prevailing
wind direction? I guess I'll have to pay attention to more snow drifts
this winter and find out!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Never mind snow drifts, pay attention to which direction the wind blows, and not just during storms but all year round. You might find that in good weather, the wind comes from the southwest, or south; during storms, and depending upon whether it's summer or winter, you might find the storms coming from the north, northwest, or west during winter, and maybe even the same direction during the summer. For example, where I am in NE TN, the wind usually comes out of the southwest. When storms approach, however, and they're going to be really bad storms, (I live in a wind tunnel here), the wind initially comes out of the southeast. It has to do with the rotation of the wind around the Low that's the center of the storm. Now it used to be back when I first moved here 18 years ago
that the storms in the summer came out of the west or southwest and during the winter, out of the northwest, and sometimes out of the west. It's all screwed up now with climate change and I can get the wind out of the east (bad), southeast (really bad), south (bad but not disasterously so), southwest (normal), west (normal), northwest (normal) or sometimes even out of the north and northeast.
During snowstorms, which usually come out of the northwest or sometimes, out of the west, my front porch, facing east, always, always, always gets snow more heavily than anywhere else. That's probably due to what you noted in your post.
Keep blogging! I love to read of your adventures and I have learned a lot!
Is this useful?
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/sites/windrose.phtml?station=UNI&network=OH_ASOS
The ASOS network is the only one I found to have wind roses. They're all at airports I tried to pick the closest to you but I don't remember exactly where you are...
You may find your home is pretty different, there's lots of hills in that area. At the very least it gives a rough outline of the yearly (and monthly) wind patterns in your area.