# How to Place Shade Structures in Wind
Instructions
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Identify prevailing wind patterns. For most locations, such information can be found from climatic records and other resources. But at a specific site, you can also find on-the-ground clues, such as "flagging" on vegetation -- asymmetrical growth of branches or stems due to chronic winds -- and piled sand, debris or other materials against obstructions like boulders or logs.
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A solitary pine or other tree in open country can provide a natural windbreak. Use natural or artificial windbreaks to place the shade structure out of the path of such prevailing air currents. In the kind of open, sun-blasted country where such structures are often needed, existing wind breaks may be few and widely scattered. But the ragged boughs of an ancient, gnarled juniper shrub, for example, cast alone on a semi-desert plain, can be enough to greatly reduce the buffeting of gusts on your sleeping or lounging shelter. Large rock outcrops, buttes and other local topographic features can serve the same function. If you're traveling in a vehicle, placing the car or truck against the wind and setting up the shelter in the lee is a convenient option.
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Use a low, ground-hugging contoured tent or similar structure so that your shelter presents a shallower profile in the face of prevailing winds. Orienting such a tent with the low foot to the windward side can at least lessen the intensity of gust-shaking in the absence of a windbreak.
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Winds shift up and down canyon slopes throughout the 24-hour cycle. Account for daily variations in wind, which may be significant in microclimates induced by local topographic features, if sleeping under a shade structure. Examples of notable wind reversals include land/sea breezes and slope winds in a valley or canyon. The greater daily swing in temperature over land versus water accounts for the former, wherein a sea breeze sloughs inland during the day and a land breeze heads seaward (or lakeward) at night. Differential heating in a valley makes for upslope winds during the day and downslope ones at night. For the outdoor recreationist, this means anticipating such changes: Unaware campers on the shores of a broad bay who set up shop in the lee of a land breeze in the evening, for example, could find their shelter toppled by stiff sea gusts by midmorning.
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