You can click anywhere on the globe map, and for different altitudes.
My first observation: for a same altitude wind speeds vary strongly. So the answer to the question would be negative except if the location is well known, although the flows are shifting.
Wow, very cool map.
There’s another one like that which I learned about from hang gliding:
What I noticed around Southern California, with our 10,000 - 11,000 foot+ tall mountains is the winds at low elevations are completely dictated by the terrain, like water in a stream going around rocks, but the higher you go (click), the more constant the wind direction and speed becomes, until at a few miles high, it turns into just “the prevailing westerlies”, including the Jet Stream. Very interesting to see how meteorology is advancing. We used to have to tune in “THE news”, to hear “THE weather report”. Now we can just tune in our computer to whatever weather data we want to know. Amazing.
The most powerful and massive jet streams seem to surround Antarctica, passing through the south of the African, American, and Australian continents.
And often they correspond to strong winds even at low altitudes, hence the expression of the Roaring Forties.
There is little air traffic around Antarctica…
For the exploitation of such winds, one can take into account the experiments and studies on parachutes, their opening and their drag coefficient Cd at high speed (see the pdf below), and see if there is a possibility of extrapolating on Parasail-based Airborne Wind Energy System.
And often, they correspond to strong winds even at low altitudes, called Roaring 40s, Furious 50s and Screaming 60s | PONANT Magazine and which would be available, whether the jet streams are or are not. There is little air traffic and few inhabitants around Antarctica, leading to a significant possibility for AWES.
Hi Pierre: Unfortunately, I don’t have a house in Antarctica - yet. Maybe instead of settling Mars, Elon should take a baby step and populate Antarctica. Warmer, with actual breathable air! Shorter flight, less danger. Elon could fly everyone there in a rocket, as a test run for Mars!
Perhaps you should start a “press-release breakthrough” company to implement high-altitude parasail electrical generation way, way down there. All you’d need then is some customers! Well, then again you could just target “disaster relief”, but the main “disaster” might be the return on investor capital when it turns out that there is no working system and no customers anyway, but at least it would fit the pattern of supposed deployment in a location too far from civilization for anyone to know it isn’t working, - why change the pattern now? if something works, don’t fix it! L)
yES pIERRE, i MUST SAY, THIS TRI-TETHER skygen SYSTEM - woops, capslok - weighs a half-ton as a start, to handle the immense forces and overheating potential of a real, working, reliable generator and rotor, but some genius figured out that with three (3) stationary tethers, a very long compression member could be inserted to relieve any hypothetical lifter kite of of the burden of elevating the half-ton turbine, and performing launches and landings every time the wind starts or stops. Instead, it is launched once every 20 years, using a crane. Amazing what that single long compression member accomplishes, without using ANY “A.I.”, 3-D Printing, etc. The bonus result is the turbine is in an aerial position and height at all times, and can then pivot toward wherever the wind comes from and start operating immediately. If the wind dies, the half-ton turbine assembly remains launched. The tethers keep it from flying away and then crashing to the ground. So I guess the AWE concept was in place long ago, adding two extra tethers and a central vertical compression member, and dispensing with the useless kite. Like Elon says, the best component is one that is eliminated - or something like that…
