New answers tagged wind
1
It is possible as @tim-medora indicated in his answer. Part of the reason this is possible is in the timeframe which each part of the wind information is gathered. Wind direction and speed is averaged over two minutes while gusts are the maximum gust over the previous ten minutes.
Office of the Federal Meteorological Handbook - Surface Weather ...
7
As other answers say, yes, this is valid. It appears approximately 150K times in our database of 85 million METARs[1]. This database is built from data provided by NOAA and covers roughly 16 months.[2]
Here are several real examples from February 2019.
KBML 011110Z AUTO VRB06G18KT 7SM OVC029 M16/M22 A3007 RMK AO2 T11611217
KSZY 011115Z AUTO VRB06G11KT 10SM ...
4
To elaborate on a previous answer, large changes in wind direction on short timescales tend to be caused by thermal updrafts passing through the area, tending to "suck" the wind toward their centers.
When the overall windspeed is high, the (relatively) small changes in wind velocity (speed and direction) caused by this phenomenon tend to be dwarfed by the ...
8
Yes, it is possible for a METAR to contain both VRB and G. VRB10G25KT is valid.
The reason it rarely happens is because, as wind speed increases, major variations in wind directions tend to disappear.
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