What is wind? How is wind made? Where does wind come from?

Answer 1

Wind is caused by air flowing from high pressure to low pressure.

Answer 2

Wind is the heating and cooling of the earth. hot air rises and colder more dense air falls.

Answer 3

Changes in air pressure, the air in an area with more pressure goes to an area with less.

Answer 4

Wind is the rough horizontal movement of air (as opposed to an air current) caused by uneven heating of the Earth's surface. It occurs at all scales, from local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting tens of minutes to global winds resulting from solar heating of the Earth. The two major influences on the atmospheric circulation are the differential heating between the equator and the poles, and the rotation of the planet (Coriolis effect).

Given a difference in barometric pressure between two air masses, a wind will arise between the two which tends to flow from the area of high pressure to the area of low pressure until the two air masses are at the same pressure, although these flows will be modified by the Coriolis effect in the extratropics.

Winds can be classified either by their scale, the kinds of forces which cause them (according to the atmospheric equations of motion), or the geographic regions in which they exist. There are global winds, such as the wind belts which exist between the atmospheric circulation cells. There are upper-level winds, such as the jet streams. There are synoptic-scale winds that result from pressure differences in surface air masses in the middle latitudes, and there are winds that come about as a consequence of geographic features such as the sea breeze. Mesoscale winds are those which act on a local scale, such as gust fronts. At the smallest scale are the microscale winds which blow on a scale of only tens to hundreds of metres and are essentially unpredictable, such as dust devils and microbursts.

Winds can also shape landforms, via a variety of eolian processes.

What makes the wind blow?
The uneven-heating of the Earth causes the wind to blow. When hot air rises and the cooler air takes its place, the result is wind! Then, when the wind reaches the troposhere, a part of the Earth's atmosphere, the wind orbits the Earth just like the Earth orbits the sun.

Because of differential heating and the fact that warm air rises and cool air falls, there arise circulations that (on a non-rotating planet) would lead to an equator-to-pole flow in the upper atmosphere and a pole-to-equator flow at lower levels. Because of the Earth's rotation, this simple situation is vastly modified in the real atmosphere. In almost all circumstances the horizontal component of the wind is much larger than the vertical — the exception being violent convection.

The Trade Winds are the most familiar consistent and reliable winds on the planet, exceeded in constancy only by the katabatic winds of the major ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. It was these winds that early mariners relied upon to propel their ships from Europe to North and South America. Their name derives from the Middle High German trade, akin to Old English trod meaning "path" or "track", and thus the phrase "the wind blows trade", that is to say, on track.

The Trades form under the Hadley circulation cell, and are part of the return flow for this cell. The Hadley carries air aloft at the equator and transports it poleward north and south. At about 30°N/S latitude, the air cools and descends. It then begins its journey back to the equator, but with a noticeably westward shift as a result of the action of the Coriolis force.

Along the east coast of North America, friction twists the flow of the Trades even further clockwise. The result is that the Trades feed into the Westerlies, and thus provide a continuous zone of wind for ships travelling between Europe and the Americas.

The Westerlies, which can be found at the mid-latitudes beneath the Ferrel circulation cell, likewise arise from the tendency of winds to move in a curved path on a rotating planet. Together with the airflow in the Ferrel cell, poleward at ground level and tending to equatorward aloft (though not clearly defined, particularly in the winter), this predisposes the formation of eddy currents which maintain a more-or-less continuous flow of westerly air. The upper-level polar jet stream assists by providing a path of least resistance under which low pressure areas may travel.

The Polar Easterlies result from the outflow of the Polar high, a permanent body of descending cold air which makes up the poleward end of the Polar circulation cell. These winds, though persistent, are not deep. However, they are cool and strong, and can combine with warm, moist Gulf Stream air transported northward by weather systems to produce violent thunderstorms and tornadoes as far as 60°N on the North American continent.

Records of tornadoes in northerly latitudes are spotty and incomplete because of the vast amount of uninhabited terrain and lack of monitoring, and it is certain that tornadoes have gone unseen and unreported. The deadly Edmonton tornado of 1987, which ranked as an F4 on the Fujita scale and killed 27 people, is evidence that powerful tornadoes can occur north of the 50th parallel.

The jet streams are rapidly moving upper-level currents. Travelling generally eastward in the tropopause, the polar jets reside at the juncture of the Ferrel cell and the Polar cell and mark the location of the polar cold front. During winter, a second jet stream forms at about the 30th parallel, at the interface of the Hadley and Ferrel cells, as a result of the contrast in temperature between tropical air and continental polar air.

The jet streams are not continuous, and fade in and out along their paths as they speed up and slow down. Though they move generally eastward, they may range significantly north and south. The polar jet stream also marks the presence of Rossby waves, long-scale (4000 - 6000 km in wavelength) harmonic waves which perpetuate around the globe.

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