General Knowledge
Why is Wellington so windy?
- Wind funnels through a strait
- It is coastal
- It is high up
The answer is Wind funnels through a strait. The Roaring Forties squeeze through Cook Strait - gusts over 200 km/h.
Because the Roaring Forties hit a gap. The westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean unobstructed by land meet New Zealand, and Cook Strait between the two islands funnels them - so a hemisphere's worth of wind is squeezed through a gap and accelerated over the city sitting in it. Gusts over 200 kilometres an hour have been recorded, and it averages about 170 days a year with gales.
The city adapted rather than complained. Wellington airport's runway is notorious among pilots, buildings are engineered for wind loading that would be unusual elsewhere, and the wind is a large part of why the harbour was chosen and why the city stayed small and dense rather than sprawling.
It is also built across an active fault, which runs visibly through the middle of it. A magnitude 8.2 earthquake in 1855 raised the land by up to two metres and created the flat ground the central business district now stands on - so the most valuable real estate in the capital exists because of the last big earthquake, and is waiting for the next one.