If you are wondering about the jet stream, this lies at 10-50 km, well out of airship reach. (EB2002CD/"Jet Stream").
In the old time line, upper air meteorological data was collected by miniaturized "meteorographs," carried by kites and balloons, beginning at least by the 1890s (Monmonier 69). This surely will happen much sooner in the new universe-if we can't build a meteorological balloon, we certainly aren't ready to launch airships!
"Author's Only" Information on Surface and Upper Air Winds
A prospective author may (indeed, better) know more than his or her characters about the conditions awaiting them. That may mean consulting modern, scholarly sources of wind climatology.
For overland flights over the United States, go here for "wind roses" (graphical representations of the probability of various wind speeds and directions):
http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/climate/windrose.html
and for wind speed only:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/societal-impacts/wind
There is wind data for other parts of the world here:
http://www.windfinder.com/windstats/
Ocean data comes from voluntary shipboard observers, buoys, and, most recently, satellites. You may obtain monthly norms of wind speed and direction for the entire world (sea only) at http://cioss.coas.oregonstate.edu/scow/opendap.html
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Here is a sample of the combined overland and ocean wind speed data that's available from the wind atlases prepared for the wind energy industry:
http://www.ceoe.udel.edu/windpower/ResourceMap/sse_figure28a_rev.gif
In general, the surface wind speed over land is half the surface wind speed over water, and one-third the speed aloft above the "friction layer." (Watts 117).
This site has separate January and July maps of (separately) wind speed and wind direction for January and July.
http://www.climate-charts.com/World-Climate-Maps.html
This site has flash animations showing changes in sea level pressure and wind vector, and 500 mb height and wind vector, for the entire world on a monthly basis:
http://geography.uoregon.edu/envchange/clim_animations/index.html
Here you can find the monthly mean 850 hPa winds for the entire world:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/realtime/clim/annual/monthly/monthly.12.w850.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/climatology/Wind-850.shtml
and for the 200 hPa pressure altitude:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/realtime/clim/annual/monthly/monthly.12.w200.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/climatology/Wind-200.shtml
The following website allows you to create maps of vector wind, scalar wind speed, zonal wind or meridional wind, for any of a great variety of pressure altitudes from the surface up, based on the average over a specified year range (chosen from 1948-2011) for any specified month or range of months or the entire year, for the entire world or specified regions. The data is from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis, and is gridded at 2.5 degree intervals.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/composites/printpage.pl
After you generate the map, you can also get a copy of the u-wind and v-wind text data file used to generate the vector wind-u-wind is the east-west component and v-wind the north-south component.
If you are dealing with a trip at the time of monsoon changeover, you may need weekly rather than monthly data. You can create a weekly report by use of a daily composite:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/
You may also access daily data here,
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.ncep.html
(click on create plot/subset for the wind data of interest).
If that's not enough information for you, you'll need to launch your own weather satellite. . . .
Conclusion
It's a pity that our characters can't carry the winds in a knotted cord, and release the wind they need by untying it. But they can do the next best thing, which is to learn to predict which winds will prevail at a particular place during a particular time of the year.
Bibliography
Meteorology
"Pressure Altitude"
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/slc/projects/wxcalc/formulas/pressureAltitude.pdf
(formula used to convert pressure altitude (mb) to geometric altitude (ft, m) on spreadsheet)
Cavcar, "The International Standard Atmosphere (ISA)",
http://home.anadolu.edu.tr/~mcavcar/common/ISAweb.pdf
Deblieu, Wind: How the Flow of Air has Shaped Life, Myth and the Land (1998)
De Villiers, Windswept (2006).
Huler, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry (2004).
Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (2000).
Watson, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984).
Gray, "Diagnostic Study of the Planetary Boundary Layer over the Oceans," Atmospheric Science Paper No. 179, Dept. Atmospheric Science, Colorado State U. (Feb. 1972)
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2 amp;doc=GetTRDoc.pdf amp;AD=AD0741717
Lewis, "Winds over the World Sea: Maury and Koppen, Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc'y, 77:935 (May 1996). http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281996%29077%3C0935%3AWOTWSM%3E2.0.CO%3B2
NASA,
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/AmazonLAI/amazon_lai3.php
Voeikov, Discussion and Analysis of Professor Coffin's Tables and Charts of the Winds of the Globe (1876)
http://www.archive.org/stream/discussionandan00voegoog#page/n90/mode/2up
Watts, The Weather Handbook (1994).
Cushman-Roisin, Chapter 8, "The Ekman Layer," in Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics: Physical and Numerical Aspects (2011)
http://engineering.dartmouth.edu/~cushman/books/GFD/chap8.pdf
(for possible use in trying to quantify frictional veering)
Wikipedia "Density of air"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_density
Ship's Logbooks
Garcia-Herrera, CLIWOC: A Climatological Database for the World's Oceans 1750-1854, Climate Change, 73: 1-12 (2005).
Garcia-Herrera, Description and General Background to Ships' Logbooks as a Source of Climactic Data, Climatic Change, 73: 13-36 (2005).
Prieto, Deriving Wind Force Terms from Nautical Reports through Content Analysis: The Spanish and French Cases, Climatic Change 73: 37-55 (2005).
Wheeler amp; Wilkinson, The Determination of Logbook Wind Force and Weather Terms: The English Case, Climatic Change, 73: 57-77 (2005).
Koek, Determination of Wind Force and Present Weather Terms: The Dutch Case, Climatic Change, 73: 79-95 (2005).
Wheeler, An Examination of the Accuracy and Consistency of Ships' Logbook Weather Observations and Records, Climatic Change 73: 97-116 (2005).
Wheeler, British Naval Logbooks from the Late Seventeenth Century: New Climatic Information from Old Sources, History of Meteorology 2:133-145 (2005).
Wheeler, Using Ships' Logbooks to Understand the Little Ice Age (1685 to 1750): developing a new source of climatic data
Wheeler, The weather during the voyage of the Royal Spanish mail Ship Grimaldi, February-March 1795
Garcia, Sailing Ship Records as Proxies of Climate Variability over the World's Oceans
Garcia-Herrera, The Use of Spanish and British Documentary Sources in the Investigation of Atlantic Hurricane Incidence in Historical Times
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The Progression of Trauma Care and Surgery after the Ring of Fire, Part 2