"Wind" is whatever factors cause 200 yard groups to be greater than twice 100 yard groups, and includes wind drift and mirage. ("Wind" becomes exponentially more important as range increases; thus this speaks to ranges of ~300 yards or less.)
Calculations of the effect of "Wind" on group size show that with no "Wind", 5/100 (5 shot 100 yard), group size would decrease 4%, 10/100 5%, 5/200 13% and 10/200 16%.  "Wind" is not a great contributor to inaccuracy.

"Goal to Go!" by Warren Page, 1957 Gun Digest

pg 83  "…In the finest accuracy shooting ever done by a large entry, that at Johnstown last Labor Day, in the hundred-yard 10-round matches, 28 of 148 riflemen averaged less than half a minute of angle. But for the fifty-shot series at twice this yardage, only two of 146, Sam Clark and myself, could stay under the half-minute mark. At 200 even the top ten shots averaged almost 30 per cent bigger groups, relatively, than they had at the shorter range, and among the less inspired trigger-squeezers the fall-off was far greater….Reason? Sighting problems, wind and mirage, which are essentially human rather than equipment problems.
     Of this inter-related pair, wind drift is far less a bogeyman to the accuracy bug than target displacement by mirage. I can remember only a few shoots (and they were conducted in minor gales) where the sights were free of mirage waves, yet bullet paths were bent and the groups enlarged by wind alone…. As a source of accuracy error, most of us cranks consider mirage four or five times as wind in normal quantities and velocities."

joeb33050 wrote on Jan 1^st, 2014 at 6:36am:


MATCHES are won or lost on one's ability to gauge the wind drift from moment to moment.  NO FEEDBACK?  Gauge the wind, take a spotter shot, shoot the target based on what you SEE, evaluate where the target was hit.  Simple.

Gauge the wind, take a spotter shot, (wind shifts without your observing it) shoot the target and pay the penalty for being UNOBSERVANT of the current conditions.

FEEDBACK is the critical component.

CW, don't you know you should listen to the one that has set all kinds of records and gets bored shooting perfect targets day in and day out.

I think what confuses Joe is the difference between a computer simulation and real life. A ballistics program assumes that when you plug in a wind velocity that it is constant for the entire 200 yards. The reality is much different. The wind may be blowing at one velocity and direction at the bench, be dead calm at 50 yards and switching wildly between two directions at 100 yards. Over its 200 yard trip the bullet may travel through 4 or 5 different wind conditions. This is the equivalent of making a 5-cushion bank shot on a pool table. The more flags that you have out the more wind information that you can sample. 
  On the other hand you can get too many flags, probes ect out and suffer from information overload. I have seen good shooters hesitate and miss good opportunities while trying to process too much information. Know your limits.
One of the reasons that people shoot under their average on a new range is they haven’t learned where to put their flags to sample conditions of the new range.

40 Rod

I always have five or six wind flags up.

The wind flag that does not react the same as the others must be watched carefully to shoot more accurately.

Wind compensation and monitoring and timing of wind gusts are absolutely essential if you wish to win competitions.

The WindMeister
2008 and 2013 International Schuetzenfest Benchrest Champion

joeb33050 wrote on Jan 1^st, 2014 at 6:33am:


I like it.  New definition of 'wind'.  NOW it includes whatever you want it to include.  Including the guy next to you breaking wind!

Liked that one, Cat.

Wind, like water in a flowing mountain stream, is a fluid (though of course less dense than water) but if joeb could somehow visualize that the behavior is similiar, he might be able to imagine for a brief moment the twists and turns, meanders, rapids and chutes, eddies, etc that the fluid moves through in its nonlinear course to a point 200 yards downstream.
Of course, you can't input (or probably imagine) all the possible variables into a spread sheet.
Maybe joeb should take a few rides in a small fixed-wing aircraft sometime and pay close attention to the continual adjustments the pilot has to make to correct for changes in the wind that must be made to get from point A to point B. And while he's observing those compensations, imagine that he's in a canoe riding on an invisible mountain stream, and then a bullet on its way to the target.

QuestionableMaynard8130 wrote on Jan 1^st, 2014 at 11:55am:

Note the "Wind", as I define it. It ain't wind, it's "Wind" that's defined. I can't figure out how to separate wind drift, mirage effect, velocity variation and some other factors. So, for 100 to 200 yard group size, all the factors are called "Wind".