Foredune growth results predominantly from sand that is blown from the beach and backshore. Predictions of multi-year potential sand supply that are based on time series of wind speed and direction measured at a regional (offshore or coastal) meteorological station, however, often grossly overpredict measured deposition volumes on the foredune. This is commonly ascribed to supply limiting factors, such as beach surface moisture or shell deposits, or to fetch limitations. Here we show that differences between regional and local (i.e., on the beach) wind characteristics can also contribute substantially to this overprediction. Using wind data collected during a five-week field experiment on a Dutch beach backed by a 20-m high, steep (1:2) foredune we found that the wind speed on the beach is lower and that the wind direction on the backshore is more alongshore than expected from the regional wind data. Both the difference in speed and direction were a function of the regional wind direction, with the largest speed reduction (to about 70% of the regional value) for shore-normal winds and the largest alongshore deflection (about 15 degrees) for shore-oblique winds. When these functional dependencies are applied to a 10-year series of regional wind data, we found that the potential annual onshore sand transport at our site, predicted with the aeolian sand transport equation of Hsu (1971), reduces from 86 to 24 m3/m. The latter is now comparable, although still somewhat higher than the measured annual deposition volume of 10 to 15 m3/m. Further analysis of the computations shows that most of this reduction is due to the difference between regional and local wind speed. In future work we will explore how much of the remaining overprediction is due to surface moisture and fetch limitations.