Winds across Illinois are beginning to still. A new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers has found that average wind speeds across the state have declined over the past three decades—and that the prevailing wind direction is slowly shifting southward. The findings, published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, have significant implications for everything from wind energy production to weather forecasting and climate modeling.
“All of this started because we wanted to look at observational data versus models to see how well the models reproduced winds,” said Allison Wallin, a graduate student in the Department of Earth Science and Environmental Change at Illinois and lead author of the study Recent Wind Stilling and Variability in Illinois. “Illinois is fifth in the country in terms of wind power capacity. They use these models for wind power projections, so we wanted to see if they are accurate and what’s going on with wind in the state.”