Wind Indicators - Which Way, the Barbs?

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OneCharlieTango

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OneCharlieTango
I’m embarrassed by my ignorance on this. I’ve been working around it since online weather briefings became a thing.

On any graphical depiction of weather, there will be wind direction flags, with barbs corresponding to wind velocity. Sometimes, the barbs are on the downwind side, so a flag lying lower left to upper right, with the barbs on the upper right, indicates a southwesterly wind. Other times, the exact same flag might indicate a northeasterly wind, with the barbs on the upwind side.

For example, enter a flight into ForeFlight and get a briefing. There will be a page called “Wind Chart,” which has the barbs downwind. The very next page, called “Vertical Cross Section Chart,” has the barbs upwind. How do you know which is which? I wind up looking at a TAF or something like that, and reading the numbers.

Ground school me, you oh-so-patient CFIs.
 
Pictures, you need pictures with those words...
 
Barbs always point into the wind. I thought that second screen (vertical path) the wind barbs were relative to flight path.
 
The second screen definitely points a magnetic direction, not a relative to flight one. See the next post.

Online sources all agree that barbs always point into the wind, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. And why should they point into the wind? That isn’t how physical wind indicators work. The feathers are downwind, the point is upwind. Or think of a windsock. The floppy part is downwind.

Sorry. Thirty years of frustration bubbling to the surface. . . .
 
These are the two pages I’m talking about.


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oh, I can't tell exactly, but the top pic appears to be 'winds at a specified altitude', while the bottom pic shows winds at diff altitudes. I don't know FF.
 
Top pic shows winds from the NE.

Be careful with bottom. The wind barbs are oriented referencing your direction of flight. In other words, they show you have a right crosswind. North is not necessarily at the top of the picture. For example, if your flight was to the north, those wind barbs show an easterly wind. There are a series of symbols at the top of that chart (cut off in your picture), that show the direction north is at that point in the flight.
 
eman1200 said:
think of them as darts. darts don't fly backwards. top pic winds are NEish, bottom pic winds are SWish
Click to expand...
It’s the same wind on the same flight. Kaiser appears to have found the answer. The direction of flight is directly left to right.
 
OneCharlieTango said:
It’s the same wind on the same flight. Kaiser appears to have found the answer. The direction of flight is directly left to right.
Click to expand...

yeah, looks like the 2nd pic might be relative to your flight path, because that's so difficult to figure out, but what's up with the FL's on the left?
 
eman1200 said:
think of them as darts. darts don't fly backwards. top pic winds are NEish, bottom pic winds are SWish
Click to expand...

Or imagine a device you could put on the top of your house that has an arrow with a big flat end that would swivel to point the arrow to where the wind is coming from.
 
He was talking about the 'velocity' thingies. The feathers so to speak. Is that so at @OneCharlieTango ? They all do the same thing. On all the pics above and the pics in the link to Foreflite. Start at the point of the 'dart' so to speak. Now start walking outbound, When you reach the 'velocity barbs' it's a right turn. Every time.
 
There's no significance. The barbs and pennants are by convention always pointing "clockwise."
 
luvflyin said:
He was talking about the 'velocity' thingies. The feathers so to speak. Is that so at @OneCharlieTango ? They all do the same thing. On all the pics above and the pics in the link to Foreflite. Start at the point of the 'dart' so to speak. Now start walking outbound, When you reach the 'velocity barbs' it's a right turn. Every time.
Click to expand...

Yeah. The confusion comes when comparing the wind barbs to an actual weathervane, which points the skinny end into the wind and the fat end away from it; exactly backwards from how these barbs are arranged.
 
OneCharlieTango said:
Yeah. The confusion comes when comparing the wind barbs to an actual weathervane, which points the skinny end into the wind and the fat end away from it; exactly backwards from how these barbs are arranged.
Click to expand...
Ah. Yeah, if it was like an actual dart with feathers, reacting to actual wind blowing, it kinda don't make sense. But that's the way it's been depicted for just about ever. What the original logic was, I dunno.
 
It helps me to think of it as a mini wind sock. The wide, barbed part is the “opening of the sock”, the thin “ tail” is being blown in the direction of the wind.
 
Yeah / it should have been reversed, like a weather vane. Pointing to where wind is from. But they didn’t ask me - their loss.
 
This drives me insane! I can't ever visualize it, I always just have to look at calculations of my ground speed to make sure I'm reading it right. Not great.
 
I always think of them like arrows. The feathers are where the wind is coming from and the other end is the arrowhead where the wind is blowing toward. I've never seen an arrow fly backwards, feathers first. Easy peasy. Cheers. :cheerswine:
 
Archer Jack said:
I always think of them like arrows. The feathers are where the wind is coming from and the other end is the arrowhead where the wind is blowing toward. I've never seen an arrow fly backwards, feathers first. Easy peasy. Cheers. :cheerswine:
Click to expand...
But an arrow in flight has the wind on the nose, moving back towards the feathers.
 
Archer Jack said:
Exactly!
Click to expand...
But I see that as the opposite of “The feathers are where the wind is coming from and the other end is the arrowhead where the wind is blowing toward. ”. I can kinda understand the opposite interpretation, but to me the logical arrow analogy would have the wind pointing at the arrowhead from the front and blowing back past the fletching to the rear.
 
Here’s the deal: we don’t care which way the wind is blowing; we care which direction it’s blowing from. Weather vanes and landing airplanes point into the wind. Flags blow downwind. The symbols we use on charts are backwards in both cases.

I’m mostly just glad that I’m not the only one getting confused by this! :D
 
I think of it as an arrow pointing in the direction the air is moving toward, not the direction the air is coming from. The feathers are on the tail of the arrow.

Before I figured that out, I always had to compare the graphical depiction to the winds-aloft table to be sure I had it right.
 
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I have always thought it was wrong but marine forecast is the same.

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Think of it like navigation lights. The phrase I use to remember is "red is right is wrong"
 
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