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Besides the westerlies, and trade winds, the large surfaces of land also effect the wind, causing cyclones, hurricanes and other deviations to the normal direction of trade wind File usage The following 10 pages use this file:
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.
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 ...
Wind direction is usually expressed in terms of the direction from which it originates. For example, a northerly wind blows from the north to the south. [8] Weather vanes pivot to indicate the direction of the wind. [9] At airports, windsocks indicate wind direction, and can also be used to estimate wind speed by the angle of hang. [10]
If the Earth were tidally locked to the Sun, solar heating would cause winds across the mid-latitudes to blow in a poleward direction, away from the subtropical ridge. . However, the Coriolis effect caused by the rotation of Earth tends to deflect poleward winds eastward from north (to the right) in the Northern Hemisphere and eastward from south (to the left) in the Southern Hemisph
Such maps have been in use since the mid-19th century and are used for research and weather forecasting purposes. Maps using isotherms show temperature gradients, [2] which can help locate weather fronts. Isotach maps, analyzing lines of equal wind speed, [3] on a constant pressure surface of 300 or 250 hPa show where the jet stream is located.
Meridional flow follows a pattern from north to south, or from south to north, along the Earth's longitude lines, longitudinal circles or in the north–south direction. [2] These terms are often used in the atmospheric and earth sciences to describe global phenomena, such as "meridional wind", or "zonal average temperature".
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 ...