Finding The Furious Fifties
metadata
- keywords:
- published:
- updated:
- Atom Feed
I have long been fascinated by the strong winds found in the Southern hemisphere such as the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. A small bit of research reveals the often stated reason for these anomalously strong winds: the scarcity of landmasses
. I wondered one day how true this statement really is so I set out to write some code to find out.
My method is simple: obtain the coastlines as shapes; intersect a line of latitude with the coastline shapes; find the length along the line of latitude that falls over land; plot these lengths versus latitude to hopefully show the scarcity of landmasses
between South America and Antartica.
Please note: The below script takes a few minutes to run because it is using pyguymer3.geo.add_map_background(ax, resolution = "large4096px")
and using the "10m" Natural Earth coastline dataset. If you would like to run it quickly for your own testing then remove the resolution
keyword argument from pyguymer3.geo.add_map_background()
(on line 32) to just have it run at its default (low) resolution and replace all instances of resolution = "10m"
with resolution = "110m"
(on lines 31 and 35). It runs optipng during its execution.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 |
|
checkout
the “main” branch).The script creates two output files: land_vs_latitude.png
and land_vs_latitude.csv
. The PNG image is shown below and displays each line of latitude in red when it is over land and in blue when it is over water. The CSV file can be downloaded and it reports the length (in km) that each line of latitude exists over land for.

I then wrote a simple gnuplot script to plot the CSV file with some labels (shown below).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 |
|
checkout
the “main” branch).Below you will see the conclusion of this little project. There are only two regions in the world where there isn’t any land along lines of constant latitude: The North Pole and between South America and Antartica. What I find interesting about this is also how thin the southern extent of South America is - the land really trails off which allows the winds to pick up speed.