Wind support, or wind profit, is the projection of the wind vector \(\vec{v}_w\) onto the groundspeed vector \(\vec{v}_g\), $$\text{Wind Support} = \frac{\vec{v}_g \cdot \vec{v}_w}{|\vec{v}_g|}$$, with \(\cdot\) being the cross product.
A positive value indicates that wind was blowing in the direction of movement, while a negative one indicates a head wind.
windspeed
and groundspeed
should be expressed as complex value where the real part
corresponds to the east-west component and imaginary part to the north-south component.
Alternatively to wind support, you can compute the drift (or crosswind component) value with
drift = TRUE
,
$$\text{Drift} = \frac{|\vec{v}_g \times \vec{v}_w|}{|\vec{v}_g|}$$,
with \(\times\) being the cross product.
A positive value of drift indicates that the wind is pushing the bird to the right of its intended path, while a negative indicates that the wind is pushing the bird to the left.
You can use abs()
(or Mod()
) to compute the norm (or absolute value) of the speed vector and
speed_to_bearing()
to compute the bearing/orientation of the speed vector. The latter
computes the trigonometric angle of the speed vector with Arg()
and convert this angle to a
bearing (North = 0° instead of 90°).