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The dominant winds are the trends in direction of wind with the highest speed over a particular point on the Earth's surface at any given time. A region's prevailing and dominant winds are the result of global patterns of movement in the Earth's atmosphere. [1] In general, winds are predominantly easterly at low latitudes globally.
The winds that flow to the west (from the east, easterly wind) at the ground level in the Hadley cell are called the trade winds. Though the Hadley cell is described as located at the equator, it shifts northerly (to higher latitudes) in June and July and southerly (toward lower latitudes) in December and January, as a result of the Sun's ...
Early efforts by scientists to explain aspects of global wind patterns often focused on the trade winds as the steadiness of the winds was assumed to portend a simple physical mechanism. Galileo Galilei proposed that the trade winds resulted from the atmosphere lagging behind the Earth's faster tangential rotation speed in the low latitudes ...
Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate ...
The term originally derives from the early fourteenth century sense of trade (in late Middle English) still often meaning "path" or "track". [2] The Portuguese recognized the importance of the trade winds (then the volta do mar, meaning in Portuguese "turn of the sea" but also "return from the sea") in navigation in both the north and south Atlantic Ocean as early as the 15th century. [3]
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The westerlies (blue) and trade winds (yellow and brown) The general atmospheric circulation. Trade winds (red), westerlies (white) and the South Pacific anticyclone (blue) [1] The westerlies, anti-trades, [2] or prevailing westerlies, are prevailing winds from the west toward the east in the middle latitudes between 30 and 60 degrees latitude.
The largest ocean gyres are wind-driven, meaning that their locations and dynamics are controlled by the prevailing global wind patterns: easterlies at the tropics and westerlies at the midlatitudes. These wind patterns result in a wind stress curl that drives Ekman pumping in the subtropics (resulting in downwelling) and Ekman suction in ...