Data story · Weather
The windiest cities in the world.
The six windiest cities in Huezle are all in the Southern Hemisphere. The four calmest are all in the rainforest. Chicago, the Windy City, comes ninth.
Every strip on this page is a real Weather strip from the Huezle app, drawn by the app’s own code. More about Weather.
How to read the strips
Each strip is one city, with one band per year from 2001 on the left to 2025 on the right. A band is coloured by how windy a normal day was that year, from Calm through Breezy to Windy, on one scale for every city.
The measure is the average daily peak: the highest wind speed of each day, 10 metres above the ground, averaged across the year. It describes the everyday wind, not the storm of the decade. The data is NASA POWER, a gridded dataset built from satellites and a weather model, so a city’s value is its grid cell’s, an area tens of kilometres across.
The windiest: Durban
- Calm
- Breezy
- Windy
Durban, on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, has the windiest everyday weather of the 193 cities, and its strip barely changes: even its calmest year, 2025, averaged 33.2 km/h. That steadiness is typical of wind. Most strips in this measure are close to one colour, because a city’s wind is set by where it is far more than by the year. So in the game, the shade of the whole strip is most of the clue.
Why the south blows harder
- Calm
- Breezy
- Windy
Wellington and Ushuaia, at the tip of South America, tie for second, with Perth and Cape Town next. Seven of the top ten are in the Southern Hemisphere. That is not an accident of which cities were chosen. The south has far less land, so the westerlies that circle the Southern Ocean have little in their way, and the cities on its edges sit in their path. Across cities between 30 and 45 degrees of latitude, the southern ones average 25.7 km/h and the northern ones 20.5 km/h.
Coasts help too. A grid cell on the shore takes in some open water, where wind meets less friction than over buildings and hills. Every city in the top ten is on a coast, an estuary or a great lake.
Is Chicago really the Windy City?
- Calm
- Breezy
- Windy
By this measure, yes: Chicago is ninth of 193 at 28.6 km/h, ahead of New York (18th) and London (30th). Lake Michigan gives the wind a long, flat run at the city. But it is well behind Durban and Wellington, and the typical city in the data peaks at 20.5 km/h on a normal day.
The calmest cities: the rainforest
- Calm
- Breezy
- Windy
The other end of the list is just as tidy. The four calmest cities are all in equatorial rainforest, and Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon, is the calmest of all at 4.9 km/h. Near the equator the big wind systems are weak, and a forest canopy slows what wind there is. The rainforest cities in the data average 11.3 km/h, about half the typical city.
Why does my city feel windier than this? Wind is the most local of these measures. A street between tall buildings, a hilltop or a harbour front can be far windier than the grid-cell average, and gusts are much stronger than the daily peaks averaged here. Use these numbers to compare cities with each other, not to forecast a walk to work.
The same 193 cities are on the hottest cities, the coldest cities and the cities most hit by earthquakes and tropical cyclones. All five measures are in the Weather category.
In Huezle a wind strip comes with four cities to choose from. Can you spot the rainforest by how pale it is?
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What is the windiest city in the world?
Of the 193 cities in Huezle, Durban in South Africa has the windiest everyday weather: a typical day’s peak wind averaged 34.5 km/h from 2001 to 2025. Ushuaia and Wellington are close behind at 33.5 km/h.
Is Chicago the windiest city in the US?
It is the windiest US city in Huezle and ninth of all 193, with a typical daily peak of 28.6 km/h. New York is next among US cities, at 26.8 km/h.
Why is Wellington so windy?
It sits in the path of the westerly winds that circle the Southern Ocean, with little land to slow them down. The six windiest cities in the data are all in the Southern Hemisphere.
What is the calmest city?
Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon, with a typical daily peak of 4.9 km/h. The four calmest cities in the data are all in equatorial rainforest.
More guides
- The hottest cities in the world, year by year.Which cities have the hottest days, and which are hottest all year round? 193 cities, 25 years of NASA data, drawn as strips of colour.
- The coldest cities in the world, year by year.Yakutsk drops below −50 °C every winter. The coldest nights in 193 cities, 2001 to 2025, drawn as strips of colour from NASA data.
- The cities most often hit by earthquakes and tropical cyclones.Davao and Tokyo lead 58 cities for strong earthquakes and tropical storms nearby, 2001 to 2025, counted year by year from USGS and NOAA.
- Which cities are warming fastest?The 25-year temperature trend for 193 cities, from NASA data. Central Europe warmed fastest, the tropics slowest, and a few cities went the other way.
Now try naming one yourself.
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