Fig. 3: Influence of wind direction.

Wind direction influence on power outages in the Southwest (a, c, e), and Midlands (b, d, f). Top row (a, b) displays wind roses for maximum wind gusts (\({v}^{X}\)) during windstorms that exceed 14 ms⁻¹. The middle row (c, d) shows wind roses for windstorms with high fault numbers (\({F}^{N} > {F}_{95}^{N}\)). Wind rose colours represent \({v}^{X}\), as detailed by the key in panel (a), while the black dots mark the prevailing wind direction. The bottom row (e, f) shows the conditional probability of impactful events (\({F}^{N} > {F}_{95}^{N}\)) given various exceedances of \({{dir}}^{X}\) (deviation from prevailing direction) for \({v}^{X} > 20\) ms⁻¹ (black) and \({v}^{X} > 25\) ms⁻¹ (blue). Dashed lines represent this probability when \({{dir}}^{X}\) is assumed independent of \({v}^{X}\) and \({F}^{N}\); shaded areas show the 95% confidence interval obtained by shuffling \({{dir}}^{X}\) in annual blocks. Dots on solid lines indicate significant probabilities that cannot be achieved by chance.