Chicago has claimed the nickname of "The Windy City", and it does get a lot of wind from the heating and cooling of Lake Michigan. But it is not the windiest city in the United States. That title goes to Amarillo, Texas.
The Weather Channel, who keeps this kind of statistic for all of America's cities, added up the wind speed for each day of the year and divided that by 365. This gave them the average wind speed for each city, and the city with the highest average wind speed was Amarillo -- at 13.6 miles per hour. Amarillo averaged a full 1 mph over the second place city -- Rochester, Minnesota.
This doesn't surprise me. I moved to Amarillo about 8 years ago, and the hardest thing to get used to was the constant wind. All cities have their windy days -- but in Amarillo, nearly every day is a windy day.
This explains why so many wind farms are springing up in the Texas Panhandle (where Amarillo is the largest city), and a huge electrical transmission line is being built from near Amarillo to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. DFW's huge population gives it a huge need for electrical power -- and the Panhandle has an abundant supply of that clean and renewable energy resource -- the wind.
NOTE -- Four of the windiest cities in the nation are in Texas. Does that make Texas the windiest state in the country?
