Wind speedIn meteorology, wind speed, or wind flow speed, is a fundamental atmospheric quantity caused by air moving from high to low pressure, usually due to changes in temperature. Wind speed is now commonly measured with an anemometer. Wind speed affects weather forecasting, aviation and maritime operations, construction projects, growth and metabolism rate of many plant species, and has countless other implications. Wind direction is usually almost parallel to isobars (and not perpendicular, as one might expect), due to Earth's rotation.
WindWind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate zones on Earth. The two main causes of large-scale atmospheric circulation are the differential heating between the equator and the poles, and the rotation of the planet (Coriolis effect).
Python (programming language)Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured (particularly procedural), object-oriented and functional programming. It is often described as a "batteries included" language due to its comprehensive standard library.
Wind turbineA wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. , hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, were generating over 650 gigawatts of power, with 60 GW added each year. Wind turbines are an increasingly important source of intermittent renewable energy, and are used in many countries to lower energy costs and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
History of PythonPython (programming language) The programming language Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to ABC capable of exception handling and interfacing with the Amoeba operating system. Van Rossum is Python's principal author, and his continuing central role in deciding the direction of Python is reflected in the title given to him by the Python community, Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).
Wind shearWind shear (or windshear), sometimes referred to as wind gradient, is a difference in wind speed and/or direction over a relatively short distance in the atmosphere. Atmospheric wind shear is normally described as either vertical or horizontal wind shear. Vertical wind shear is a change in wind speed or direction with a change in altitude. Horizontal wind shear is a change in wind speed with a change in lateral position for a given altitude.
Comma-separated valuesComma-separated values (CSV) is a format that uses commas to separate values. A CSV file stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text, where each line of the file typically represents one data record. Each record consists of the same number of fields, and these are separated by commas in the CSV file. If the field delimiter itself may appear within a field, fields can be surrounded with quotation marks . The CSV file format is one type of delimiter-separated file format.
Wind gradientIn common usage, wind gradient, more specifically wind speed gradient or wind velocity gradient, or alternatively shear wind, is the vertical component of the gradient of the mean horizontal wind speed in the lower atmosphere. It is the rate of increase of wind strength with unit increase in height above ground level. In metric units, it is often measured in units of meters per second of speed, per kilometer of height (m/s/km), which reduces to the standard unit of shear rate, inverse seconds (s−1).
Delimiter-separated valuesFormats that use delimiter-separated values (also DSV) store two-dimensional arrays of data by separating the values in each row with specific delimiter characters. Most database and spreadsheet programs are able to read or save data in a delimited format. Due to their wide support, DSV files can be used in data exchange among many applications. A delimited text file is a used to store data, in which each line represents a single book, company, or other thing, and each line has fields separated by the delimiter.
Wind powerWind power is the use of wind energy to generate useful work. Historically, wind power was used by sails, windmills and windpumps, but today it is mostly used to generate electricity. This article deals only with wind power for electricity generation. Today, wind power is generated almost completely with wind turbines, generally grouped into wind farms and connected to the electrical grid. In 2022, wind supplied over 2000 TWh of electricity, which was over 7% of world electricity and about 2% of world energy.
Thermal windIn atmospheric science, the thermal wind is the vector difference between the geostrophic wind at upper altitudes minus that at lower altitudes in the atmosphere. It is the hypothetical vertical wind shear that would exist if the winds obey geostrophic balance in the horizontal, while pressure obeys hydrostatic balance in the vertical. The combination of these two force balances is called thermal wind balance, a term generalizable also to more complicated horizontal flow balances such as gradient wind balance.
Python syntax and semanticsThe syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted (by both the runtime system and by human readers). The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some definite differences between the languages. It supports multiple programming paradigms, including structured, object-oriented programming, and functional programming, and boasts a dynamic type system and automatic memory management.
Flat-file databaseA flat-file database is a database stored in a file called a flat file. Records follow a uniform format, and there are no structures for indexing or recognizing relationships between records. The file is simple. A flat file can be a plain text file (e.g. csv, or tsv), or a . Relationships can be inferred from the data in the database, but the database format itself does not make those relationships explicit. The term has generally implied a small database, but very large databases can also be flat.
AnemometerIn meteorology, an anemometer () is a device that measures wind speed and direction. It is a common instrument used in weather stations. The earliest known description of an anemometer was by Italian architect and author Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) in 1450. The anemometer has changed little since its development in the 15th century. Alberti is said to have invented it around 1450. In the ensuing centuries numerous others, including Robert Hooke (1635–1703), developed their own versions, with some mistakenly credited as its inventor.
File formatA file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a . It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata.
Machine-readable medium and dataIn communications and computing, a machine-readable medium (or computer-readable medium) is a medium capable of storing data in a format easily readable by a digital computer or a sensor. It contrasts with human-readable medium and data. The result is called machine-readable data or computer-readable data, and the data itself can be described as having machine-readability. Machine-readable data must be structured data. Attempts to create machine-readable data occurred as early as the 1960s.
Reference (computer science)In computer programming, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular data, such as a variable's value or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the datum, and accessing the datum is called dereferencing the reference. A reference is distinct from the datum itself. A reference is an abstract data type and may be implemented in many ways. Typically, a reference refers to data stored in memory on a given system, and its internal value is the memory address of the data, i.
WxPythonwxPython is a wrapper for the cross-platform GUI API (often referred to as a "toolkit") wxWidgets (which is written in C++) for the Python programming language. It is one of the alternatives to Tkinter. It is implemented as a Python extension module (native code). In 1995, Robin Dunn needed a GUI application to be deployed on HP-UX systems but also run Windows 3.1 within short time frame. He needed a cross-platform solution. While evaluating free and commercial solutions, he ran across Python bindings on the wxWidgets toolkit webpage (known as wxWindows at the time).
Creative Commons licenseA Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Creative CommonsCreative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.
