Chris Scott,
On the winds, there are four pages with numerous graphs, devoted to the winds in the Drift Analysis report. Here's an excerpt.
Several wind products are available for our study area and period. All come from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models assimilating a large amount of meteorological data (measured in-situ or remotely).
Three global (i.e. world covering) wind fields have been used: NCEP (named after the National Centers for Environmental Prediction), ECMWF (named after the European Center for Mediumrange Weather forecast) and an experimental version of ARPEGE from Météo-France. Actually, both the operational products and their reanalysis (NRA-2, ERA Interim) were used. A reanalysis is a new run of the model but with assimilation of more and fully validated past data (thus it is not a forecast but a “hindcast”). Time resolution is four times daily (0h, 6h, 12h and 18h) and the spatial grid is a 0.5° regular one in longitude and latitude over the ACARS zone. However, the ARPEGE version has a finer 0.18° mesh size and 1 hourly wind outputs (see C. Payan report for details).
Figure 13 shows the ECMWF winds (at 10 m above the sea surface) and cumulonimbus clusters on June 1 every 6h. Southward winds are prevailing north of LKP, and there is a strong convective activity (with heavy rains) over the zone except in the Northwest. During the following days winds slackened and veered to easterly trades, while the convective activity decreased drastically.
The drift analysis group ultimately used a blend of the models for the windfield over the June 1-6 period.