Where does the wind come from?

Question

How is it made? If there was no wind would there still be waves? Is wind to do with the moon?

Answer 1

the wind is caused by convection heating of the atmosphere. As the atmoshere heats up causing the gases to expand and rise. The cooler air comes in to replace the rising air

Answer 2

Wind comes from temperature or pressure differences. Imagine you live near the coast. Land heats up and cools off much faster than water does. So during the day, land heats up from the sun. Hot air over the land expands and rises. Wind would tend to blow from land to the cooler waters. At night, land cools faster so when the air becomes denser, and lower pressure, the wind blows from the water towards land. Now imagine this effect over continents of various shapes and sizes and mountain ranges.

Waves are caused by wind mostly, so if there was no wind, there would be very little waves. Go to a pond on a windless day. It would be pretty calm.

The moon has very little effect on earth's wind. The moon affects the tides (which is different from waves). The moon gravity pulls the ocean's water so that the level of the seas rises and falls each day, as the earth rotates.

That's a very good question by the way. I hope this helps.

Answer 3

All our weather is driven by the heat of the Sun.
The Moon has a small tidal effect, but negligible compared to the heat of the Sun.

Here is a _Very-very_ simplistic explanation of how wind arises.
The Sun heats the Earth's surface (including the oceans). This heat is then imparted to the atmosphere through evaporation and conduction. Since not all parts of the Earth are heated equally at the same time, there are volumes of the atmosphere with more heat than others. Rudimentary thermodynamics tells us that heat tends to flow from a high temperature to a low temperature. Since it's the air which is carrying this heat, it's the air that flows, hence wind.

There's much much more to weather than this, but it is the most basic concept of how weather and wind arises.

Cheers.

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.

There will still be an upward and downward motion of the waves if there is no wind but the horizontal motion of the waves created by the wind will diminish. I think there will be wave like motion without winds due to other factors, like moving vessels and the rotation of earth, under water volcanic activities, also due to temperature changes in the waters due to the heating of the sun, land and ice caps.

The wind has nothing to do with the moon.

A very good question, thank you for asking.

Answer 5

the wind comes from pressure imbalences. The greater the difference in pressure, the stronger the wind.

Wind has nothing to do with the moon; that's the tides, not wind.

Answer 6

Wind is caused by pressure gradients between one area and another; the greater the pressure difference, the greater the wind.

Waves on the other hand are caused by the moon's gravity.

Answer 7

Land heats up faster than the sea does in the day. the hot air above the earth rises and the cool air of the sea rushes in to replace it, creating wind in the day time. in the night time, it's the opposite. the sear are slightly warmer than land, so as air above the sea rises, air above the land rushes out towards the sea to replace it, creating wind in the night.

Answer 8

The wind is caused by the rotation of the Earth; it's position in space, and the spherical nature of the planet.

But, mainly the wind is causes by the differences between hot and cold which are generated by the physical nature of the factors I listed above.

As an area heats up then the air rises, and the cold air rushes in to replace it; creating wind. This is why it is always coldest before the dawn; the rising sun generates a flow of air to replace the rising air, which blows across the observer. Then there is the equator, which is slightly closer to the sun and gets more direct sunshine. So the air there heats up and pulls colder air from the poles toward the equator. Then the oceans act as great heat sinks, when an air stream passes over the cooler ocean it is robbed of some of its heat.

The ocean also has its currents caused by the heating of the sun. As the sun warms the water it also moves to make way for the colder water to flow in. All of this activity is taking place on the surface, and a few hundred feet below the surface.

With the changing of the temperature on the Earth the winds are created. That is the primary force that makes the wind flow.

So why doesn’t the air or the currents flow in the same direction all the time? Some does and some doesn’t. In the north, over the US the Jet Stream is a rushing high altitude current running from west to east. It’s called the Jet Stream because passenger jets use it to save fuel and time on trips toward the east. When jets travel west they fly at a lower altitude to avoid the Jet Stream.

The Earth is a very complex engine and subtle changes can create new weather effects (the butterfly effect). Currently there is a warm patch in the Pacific Ocean west of South America—El Nino. This warm air creates currents that influence the Jet Stream. When the Jet Stream shifts south then we get a rush of artic air flowing south. This is what caused the massive cold weather surge in January 2007.

When one area, like El Nino, increases in temperature, when its counterpart El Nina decreases in temperature the winds change; normally this isn’t so bad, but in the two examples I named the temperature change is greater than normal so it has a stronger effect. These warm and cold spots have been around for a very long time, but in recent years they are causing more havoc with the world’s weather.

We are undergoing a period of global climate change so our weather is in flux. This change has been made worse by global warming. As the Earth grows warmer, energy is added to the system, then the weather changes increase as well. Swinging more and more to the extreme, and making it harder to predict. This is what drove such storms like Hurricane Katrina and scientists fear will make things even worse.

Global Warming by humans has been caused by burning more and more hydrocarbons, which release carbon in the air. The carbon binds with the oxygen creating more carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide and use the carbon to construct themselves; they then expel the oxygen as waste. This is what makes plants so important they not only lock in a lot of carbon, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air as well as producing oxygen which all animals need to breathe. Since prehistoric times mankind has been burning trees and steadily cutting down plants. Now days the burning of fuel like oil and coal just introduces more carbon dioxide into the air. Both of these fuels are formed from dead plant matter that is subjected to millions of pounds of pressure and hundreds of centuries of time. So we have only increased the amount of plants that we are burning and we are clearing more and more land for people to use, drive on and live on. We try to replace a lot of the foliage on that land, but it is never as dense as the foliage found in a forest. Now when you multiply it over the centuries that man has been doing this at an ever increasing level it is no surprise that we are experiencing Global Warming.

For an example of Global Warming gone amok you only have to look at the planet Venus. The Russians sent, and lost, a lot of probes to Venus. With those probes, and the few that the US has sent we have developed a profile of the weather on Venus. The immense cloudbank creates pressures on the surface closer to that found in the depths of the ocean rather than what we feel on the surface of the Earth. These huge cloudbanks trap the heat in and makes it too hot for liquid water to exist. Instead of water, it rains acid rain formed out of sulfuric acid, onto the parched land below. This heavy acidic downpour marks the land like lava flows. On Earth we have found some life forms that can survive near enough to these conditions on volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean, but the chances of something like this developing on Venus are slight. The pressures are so much greater, the heat is so much hotter, and the lack of free water prevents it.

As Global Warming increases you can expect to see more weird weather. The huge size of the Earth and the changing conditions makes if very hard to predict the weather, which is why scientists predicted a big hurricane season in 2006 that never materialized. The hurricane season may have been more active, but the weather was more active in other ways, which once again leads to the winter blast in January 2007.

Wind is caused by changing heat and cold, driven by the sun. The gravitational tides of the moon have only a minor effect since they affect an entire area equally. It is the changing temperature that is the main driver of the winds and of our weather.

Answer 9

It's all those trees waving their branches about!

Answer 10

Trees sneezing.