The One Minute Geographer: The Great Plains — The Good Wind and the Bad Wind
More from the One Minute Geographer about the 100-degree meridian and how it relates to wind, wind power generation and tornadoes.
The Great Plains is the windiest area of the continental United States. The absence of trees helps make it windy on the surface, but the main reasons for the winds are airstreams coming down from the Rockies to the West, the shifting pattern of the jet stream above, and the regular battle that takes place along the fronts of warmer, moist air masses moving in from the Gulf of Mexico to the southeast, meeting with cooler, drier air (and in winter, frigid air) moving southward from Canada and the Arctic. The map above shows winds at an altitude of 30 meters, about 100 feet, where wind energy starts to be tapped for wind power.
You can see that some of the strongest winds lie under and just west of the 100-degree meridian. The strongest winds are in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and southwest Kansas, then northward in pockets along the Great Plains.
The next map shows how this wind has been tapped for electric power generation by giant wind turbines. Texas, by far, is the top wind generating state and Oklahoma and Kansas are two of the next top three states. (The other state is Iowa in the Midwest.) Combined, these three states of the…
