I'll start by saying I'm no long range expert but I do have some experience having won a couple annual seasons of steel matches out to 1450Y and our only ELR match in that club.
My friend and his shooting range is most of the way up a hill. Keeping it short, I've seen bullets do the weirdest things there, but not just there, also at the place where the steel match I mentioned was held which is also up a hill.
I'm not just talking about the horizontal aspect but also the vertical. The worst example in this respect went like this....
Keep in mind that for both examples I used the same rifle and ammo out of the same bin of handloads, and shot at the exact location, on the same steel. The rifle was a $3000 M700 all out custom in 6x47L with a 5-25 S&B scope on top.
The first day I thought my scope had broke. It was windy, like 15 mph or so, the wind was somewhat gusty and coming from say 10:00 to 11:00. The result was I was using twice the windage usually needed for those conditions and I was hitting .5-.6 mils high and missing the 550Y ram I was aiming at which is my friends closest steel on that part of the range, which isn't a far shot, right?! The same thing happened with the rest of the farther steel I shot at??? I stopped and contemplated the why's but blamed my scope.
Wanting to try to confirm a scope problem before I sent it back for repair, only 4 days later, I confirmed my zero then cold bore shot the ram in the middle, like usual, and went on to hit the rest of the steel with the dope SHOOTER app gave me, which normally happens.
Me, logically thinking to myself about the first day, was...okay I get that maybe there was something wrong with my scope tracking "elevation wise", but how was it I had to "hold" twice the windage which makes no sense as far as something being wrong with the scope??? After shooting 4 days later I concluded the scope was not broke and has worked fine since.
At the location where the steel match was held I would always check my zero to make sure it was on. There were more than a few times my dope was off when it should not have been, after all I had practiced a couple times earlier in the week with no head scratching moments going on. Anyway, we shot at each steel twice in this match, this being a dusty area we could see our misses in the dirt most of the time. On certain windy days I had to hold bottom of steel and more wind than usual to make hits??? I asked the other competitors if they were experiencing what I was and they agreed they were hitting higher too.
A mystery... of course we would think the bullet would be doing the exact opposite of what I described so my only idea is the wind coming almost straight into the big wide hill we were shooting from had created a vortex updraft pushing the bullet up, and put twice the push to the right on the bullet.
The friend that owns his shooting range has told me that they have shot plenty of tracers in the past during snow cover at extreme distances for the sheer fun of seeing what they do, and he describes watching them on windy days as similar to watching a roller coaster.
All I'm saying is there are anomalies that happen and some seem to be wind induced.
