100m wind calculator

The 100m uses the correction published by physicist J. R. Mureika (Eq. 13 of his paper). It models how much of a sprinter's effort goes into overcoming air drag, and how wind and thinner air at altitude change that drag:

t is the official time, w the wind in m/s (tailwind positive) and H the altitude in metres. The paper says it applies below about 2,300 m. We checked our implementation against the corrected times in the paper's four tables: 37 of 43 match to the hundredth, five differ by 0.01 s, and one entry (a 10.78 at 1,380 m) looks like a misprint. With no wind, a 10.00 run at 1,000 m gains 0.03 s from altitude alone.

The 200m and sprint hurdles use the formulas from Moinat, Fabius and Emanuel (2018), fitted to 150,169 real results from sea-level meets. Those formulas reproduce the paper's headline figures: a +2.0 m/s tailwind is worth 0.140 s in the 200m and 0.146 s in the hurdles.

For the 100m the calculator also shows the Moinat result, which ignores altitude and gives slower athletes a bigger wind effect (the paper puts it 69% larger for a 13-second runner than for a 10-second one).

Maurice Greene's 9.79 world record (+0.1 m/s, Athens, about 110 m altitude) corrects to 9.80. Obadele Thompson's wind-aided 9.69 (+5.7 m/s, El Paso, about 1,300 m) corrects to 9.91. Both match the values in Mureika's tables.

At sea level, Mureika's model makes a +2.0 m/s tailwind worth 0.10 s to a 10.00 run. The table shows what a 10.00 and an 11.00 would be with no wind, by wind reading: