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Range Report need help with judging wind

M

Mc85

Sergeant
Full Member
Minuteman
Mar 22, 2004
170
0
39
Indiana
What would you trust more..., Mirage, or junk blowing around on and by the back stop,distant tree branches, grass in the field ect.?
Im shooting at a range in Indiana and I can't seem to figure out the winds there.Mirage seems to indicate one thing but the way things are blowing seems to say another. Most of the time it seems I get better results with mirage, but I am still really new at shooting past 300 yds and any help or input would be great.
Thanks
Shawn
 
Re: need help with judging wind

A good trick to learn also is to measure the wind speed at your location and observe the effects on the surrounding, such as small branches are swaying, loose leaves are flying and such. Then observe the same phenomenon at your target site. This is in the event that you don't have the luxury of having a flag at every 100 yards. This will give you an "educated guess" on the wind speed and perhaps direction. If go for long range, I would do the same thing somewhere between you and the target. You may have more than one wind patterns depending on where you shoot. Out here in the desert, it's a given.
 
Re: need help with judging wind

1+ on wind speed at your location. I trust my cheek, but I might be little more sensitive than most. Train yourself - if you can't buy a Kestrel see if you can borrow one to train yourself. The beauty is you don't need to be at a range to practice it.
 
Re: need help with judging wind

i'm a mirage guy. I can see it anywhere at any time and like ukd said..practice any time i want. the way it works for me is that by watching how fast the mirage goes by, i dont have to take in wind direction into consideration. try this next time you remember to... first note the direction of the wind...face right into it and you will notice what looks like a boil..now turn 180° and you will see the boil as well...now start to turn back into the wind. as you turn you will see it go from a boil to slow movement. as you reach 90° the mirage will be moving the fastest (its actual speed) and then back to being into the wind the mirage appears to slow again. but the whole time the mirage looks like its going l-r or r-l.
so a lot of people simply gauge the wind speed and then direction and come up w/ a value for the wind based on direction. thats basically what i'm doing but w/o the value system. mirage will always look like its from the left or the right or boil. so i just treat the wind like its perfectly perp to me and the target.
 
Re: need help with judging wind

i have found that pilots and skydivers have a decent appreciation of meteorological conditions....after all they truly got some skin in the game.
 
Re: need help with judging wind

Try to evaluate the wind for this shot
frown.gif

Lets just say there was a bit of guess work. That lovely 1000' deep valley has some hidden surprised which swooped up when we needed them least...

IMG_4564.jpg
 
Re: need help with judging wind

Thanks for all the input! This weekend went pretty well. I put up a flag 10 yds down from me, and one at 530yds. I couldn't make out any mirage until a brief part of the day when the sun came out for a bit. The wind was blowing between 3-5 and gusting to 12ish @ 1oclk but it was shifting between 9 and 3 quite a bit. Probably about every 15 -40 seconds.
It went good, but aside from the switching direction. So far it was one of the easier days for me. I was hitting oceanspray bottles at 530 and doing about 7 inch groups at 716 by the end of the day. Nothing great but its a start.
Any more advice I would be glad to hear.
Thanks.
 
Re: need help with judging wind

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: BOLTRIPPER</div><div class="ubbcode-body">ok....pazzo....what time of the day was the picture taken </div></div>

Exactly 1532 hrs
grin.gif
 
Re: need help with judging wind

Beaufort Wind Scale. Look it up.

...and no, I'm not cracking wise...
 
Re: need help with judging wind

Yeah I have checked it out before, and it is a good reference.
I guess really what Im asking is if I see the grass on top of the back stop or trees in the area moving one direction, but I see the mirage going the other what would you trust most?
 
Re: need help with judging wind

The mirage. By the time the bullet gets to the winds the backstop foliage is showing, it's already hitting the target, so basically, they're having zero effect.

Winds at varying distances all have much the same effect (technically they have a tad more further out because the bullet is slower and spends more time in the particular disturbance, but the difference is minor), but the consequences of those effects have more and more time to deviate from the original heading the closer they are to the shooter and the greater the portion of the trajectory follows the disturbance.

Am I making sense?
 
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