What kind of wind blows

What are the Santa Ana Winds? The Santa Ana winds are strong, extremely dry down-slope winds that originate inland and affect coastal Southern California and northern Baja California. Santa Ana winds blow mostly in autumn and winter, but can arise at other times of the year.

They can range from hot to cold, depending on the prevailing temperatures in the source regions, the Great Basin and upper Mojave Desert.

The winds are known especially for the hot dry weather often the hottest of the year that they bring in the fall, and are infamous for fanning regional wildfires.

For these reasons, they are sometimes known as the "devil winds" across Southern California. What are the global wind patterns? The equator receives the Sun's direct rays. Here, air is heated and rises, leaving low pressure areas behind.

Moving to about thirty degrees north and south of the equator, the warm air from the equator begins to cool and sink. Between thirty degrees latitude and the equator, most of the cooling sinking air moves back to the equator.

The rest of the air flows toward the poles. What are the trade winds? The trade winds are just air movements toward the equator. They are warm, steady breezes that blow almost continuously. The Coriolis Effect makes the trade winds appear to be curving to the west, whether they are traveling to the equator from the south or north. What are the doldrums? The doldrums is an area of calm weather. The trade winds coming from the south and the north meet near the equator.

These converging trade winds produce general upward winds as they are heated, so there are no steady surface winds. What are the prevailing westerlies?

Between thirty and sixty degrees latitude, the winds that move toward the poles appear to curve to the east. Because winds are named from the direction in which they originate, these winds are called prevailing westerlies.

Prevailing westerlies in the Northern Hemisphere are responsible for many of the weather movements across the United States and Canada. What are the polar easterlies?

At about sixty degrees latitude in both hemispheres, the prevailing westerlies join with the polar easterlies to reduce upward motion. The polar easterlies form when the atmosphere over the poles cools. This cool air then sinks and spreads over the surface. As the air flows away from the poles, it is turned to the west by the Coriolis effect.

Again, because these winds begin in the east, they are called easterlies. What is a sea breeze? On a warm summer day along the coast, this differential heating of land and sea leads to the development of local winds called sea breezes.

As air above the land surface is heated by radiation from the Sun, it expands and begins to rise, being lighter than the surrounding air. To replace the rising air, cooler air is drawn in from above the surface of the sea. This is the sea breeze, and can offer a pleasant cooling influence on hot summer afternoons. What is a land breeze? A land breeze occurs at night when the land cools faster than the sea.

Air molecules will spread out, spacing themselves far apart if they have the room. In the places where air is warmed most, it rises. There is still air everywhere, but the air molecules are more widely spaced in some areas and more tightly packed in others. The places with more air molecules have higher pressure. The areas with fewer air molecules have lower pressure. Air whooshes into the area with lower pressure. So when you let the air out of a balloon, you are making a little bit of wind.

Sometimes wind is just a light breeze and other times it is strong enough to blow the roofs off buildings. To describe the strength of wind, weather reports often use words like Light Wind, Strong Wind, and Gale. The gases that make up our atmosphere do interesting things as the temperatures change.

When gases warm up, the atoms and molecules move faster, spread out, and rise. When air is colder, the gases get slower and closer together. Colder air sinks. The sun warms up the air, but it does so unevenly.

Because the sun hits different parts of the Earth at different angles, and because Earth has oceans, mountains, and other features, some places are warmer than others. Because of this, we get pockets of warm air and cold air. Since gases behave differently at different temperatures, that means you also get pockets with high pressure and pockets with low pressure. In areas of high pressure, the gases in the air are more crowded. In low pressure zones, the gases are a little more spread out.