All,
I was having dinner with my science friend Bruce the other night and he asked about Cooper. I told him there was a big discussion about the flight path and the placard drift rate. Bruce is retired from JPL, created the first clear air turbulence instrument and was on the team that discovered the ozone hole. He described the boundary layer  over land (as opposed to water) as going from 0-3000 feet or so and it is in this layer that the winds typically are in a different direction from winds aloft. He said the way to answer the question is get the radiosonde data from those dates in that area and it would show the winds from ground to 12K+ feet or so. It turns out that the data is tricky to get and condense into readable form so I had to bribe him with a steak dinner and now we have the data!

The two closest locations were Salem just south of Portland and Quillayute Bruce said was just west of Seattle. They launch twice a day at 5pm and 5am so that is the data we have. I had him pull a second random day Nov 11 for comparison and you can see that the winds then were actually east near the ground. Nov 24 looks pretty consistent all the way down but seems to be more southerly than we had estimated. Now you can do a proper analysis.

Tom Kaye

Shutter, Andrade1812, Georger, Chaucer, and yours truly "Thanked" TK.  Aren't some of you now claiming you have never seen this post even though you replied to it?

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Thanks to georger I was able to see some of Tom's data on wind speed. According to that, the wind direction and wind speed were remarkably consistent from Seattle down to Portland - even at higher altitudes. This isn't anything new. Tom posted this a couple of years ago. What's interesting is that the wind direction was less from the southwest and more from the south. In fact, I'd say the wind was blowing at an angle of 250 or 260 degrees rather than the commonly held 220. Other historical data from Weather Underground support this:  the wind was blowing from the south around 6 pm and had slowly shifted to the south-southwest by 10 pm.

Wind speed was light at 10,000 feet but jumped dramatically at 8,000 feet before tailing off quite quickly the closer you get to the ground.

Not sure if this really affects much, but interesting to me nonetheless.

Chaucer, I hate to have to ask you this, but have you ever heard of a "compass rose"?  If not, here is a brief tutorial for you. 

True North (which is not to be confused with Magnetic North) is labeled 000 degrees or 360 degrees which is the same thing here.  Going around a circle in a clockwise direction (oddly enough this is the same direction all the hands on a clock rotate, although I have seen exceptions to this), 090 degrees is labeled East, 180 degrees is labeled South, 270 degrees is labeled West, and 360 degrees is labeled North as is 000 degrees.

In your post above, you list the winds as coming from a more westerly direction, not more southerly direction, than the data supports.

Your claims about the wind velocity are not accurate either. 

The FAA has excellent publications, which are downloadable and free, on their web page.  Some of those publications relate to aircraft navigation and some to aviation weather.  I suggest that you download them and give them a good study.  You might learn something.  Good luck.