Jose wrote:

I suspect it's a holdover from weather. You don't care where wind is
going (for the purposes of weather prediction) but you do care where it
came from (as that gives hints as to what kind of airmass will be
arriving, and what it will bring with it).

Actually this is incorrect. Which way the air is moving here and now
doesn't tell us about what weather we can expect in the future, it only
tells us who is going to inherit our current weather. To figure out
what weather we are going to get, you'd have to look at weather that is
being blown towards us by the winds in its area - and for predictions
of more than an hour or two into the future, the location of the
weather being blown towards us may not be that from which our current
local wind is yet arriving.

Of course real weather prediction also looks at things like local
pressures.