Rick Dimont writes with this question:

I am looking at some of your charts and just want to be clear on definitions. When it says "wind direction" is that the direction the wind is headed or from where it is coming from; i.e. wind is out of the SSE means it's headed NNW.  Is that what wind direction means?

Good question. It can be confusing. The wind direction designations mean that the wind is COMING FROM the cited direction. "North winds at 24 mph" means the wind is from the north at that speed. Similarly, "westerly" winds are blowing out of the west. Ditto for "easterlies," such as the "easterly" trade winds." And just to confuse matters, weather vane arrows point to the direction from which the wind is coming, not where it is going.

Early weather observers once assumed that storms were coming at them from the same direction as the winds. But as communications improved, they began to realize that storms sometimes reached City B after they struck City A, even though the wind was blowing from the direction of City B .

As we have all learned during the past couple of hurricane seasons, the winds around cyclonic storms blow in a counter-clockwise direction (at least in the Northern Hemisphere). As hurricanes approached the Gulf Coast from the south, communities on the east side of the storm's center got their strongest winds from the south, off the Gulf. But towns west of the storm center were getting pounded from the north - inland. In the absence of modern satellites and communications, they might well have concluded the storm itself was coming at them from the north.