It’s interesting riding the same route back and forth to work every day. I have a perception that the wind is always in my face, and wondered if maybe the wind tends to be going one direction in the morning, and another in the afternoon when I’m riding home. Despite the fact that riding home seems much easier than riding to work, the wind always seems stronger.

If you look at the little map of my bicycling route from work on the right, you can see that the major portion of the trip is in a northwesterly (to work) or southeasterly (from work) direction. The long stretch that’s north/south is Miller Hill, and wind doesn’t really matter on that section of the route because it’s a steep hill. The color of the dots indicate speed from blue (slow) to red (fast).

I took a look at the wind data from our weather station for the days I bicycled to work; for the two hours before and after each ride on those dates. The weather database has a binned summary of wind direction (each row in the table shows the number of five-minute observations where the wind was blowing in a particular cardinal direction) and an average speed. I multiplied the two for each hour during my rides, and then summed them over all my rides this year. The plot below shows what the data looks like.

And, for reference, the SQL query, data set and gnuplot script. It took me forever to figure out how to make gnuplot make a histogram of this data.

I was right about it being windier on my ride home from work. But, my perception that the wind is always in my face isn’t right. In both the morning and afternoon, there are two predominant wind directions, northwest (which would be at my back on the way home) and south-southeast (in my face). This is one of those cases where I notice when the wind is in my face, but when it’s at my back it doesn’t register.

At some point I’ll have to see if there’s any relationship between my average speed and the wind. At least then I’d have something to blame when I arrive at my destination with a slow time.