Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In meteorology, prevailing wind in a region of the Earth's surface is a surface wind that blows predominantly from a particular direction. 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 ...
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us
During the Age of Sail, the pattern of prevailing winds made various points of the globe easy or difficult to access, and therefore had a direct effect on European empire-building and thus on modern political geography. For example, Manila galleons could not sail into the wind at all. [4] Edmond Halley's map of the trade winds, 1686
Consequently, a wind blowing from the north has a wind direction referred to as 0° (360°); a wind blowing from the east has a wind direction referred to as 90°, etc. Weather forecasts typically give the direction of the wind along with its speed, for example a "northerly wind at 15 km/h" is a wind blowing from the north at a speed of 15 km/h ...
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. They originate from the high-pressure areas in the horse latitudes (about 30 degrees) and trend towards the poles and steer extratropical cyclones in this general manner. [ 3 ]
The wind barb points in the direction from which the wind is coming. Each full flag on the wind barb represents 10 knots (19 km/h) of wind, each half flag represents 5 knots (9 km/h). When winds reach 50 knots (93 km/h), a filled in triangle is used for each 50 knots (93 km/h) of wind. [17]
Before the development of the compass rose, a wind rose was included on maps in order to let the reader know which directions the 8 major winds (and sometimes 8 half-winds and 16 quarter-winds) blew within the plan view. No differentiation was made between cardinal directions and the winds which blew from those directions.
A wind atlas contains data on the wind speed and wind direction in a region. [1] These data include maps , but also time series or frequency distributions . A climatological wind atlas covers hourly averages at a standard height (10 meters) over even longer periods (30 years) but depending on the application there are variations in averaging ...