One good side-effect of our cool and cloudy weather lately is the relative lack of windy days. Fargo Moorhead is a very windy place and April is, on average, our windiest month of the year with an average wind speed of 14.4 mph for the entire month. That is a full mph higher than the second and third windiest months, May and March.
During a more typical April, when fields are not flooded and skies are not perpetually cloudy, there will be a number of days with warm sunshine beaming down on dry fields, causing thermal updrafts which can rise hundreds of feet into the air. These thermals create turbulence and if there is already a breeze going, by afternoon it is common to have winds in the Red River Valley gusting well over 40 mph.
But this year, the fields are wet or flooded and the skies have been frequently cloudy, so our windy weather has been purely due to the passage of weather systems, keeping our winds this April about the same as the rest of the year.
