Please explain Standard Deviation?
We are going to call on our statistical knowledge to help explain this. When we periodically look out the window and watch how much the tree limbs are bending, we are actually sampling the wind speed. When we look at the limb a couple of minutes later, we notice the limb to be bending half as much, so our mind averages the two samples and decides an overall wind speed and gust feeling. The weather station computer is doing the same job with the help of the anemometer. It takes a wind speed reading every 7.5 seconds and uses the Standard Normal Distribution (SD) (a.k.a.: Gaussian distribution) function to compute an average wind speed and calculate the standard deviation. The maroon color in the graph below illustrates the Standard Normal Distribution function. The vertical axis represents the probability of getting a certain wind speed reading as the wind fluctuates. The units on the horizontal axis are wind speed in MPH. On those rare occasions when the wind is almost constant, the cu
