“Wind forms when the sun heats one part of the atmosphere differently than another part. This causes expansion of warmer air, making less pressure where it is warm than where it is cooler. Air always moves from high pressure to lower pressure, and this movement of air is wind.” source
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
116 points (93.3% liked)
Showerthoughts
35781 readers
870 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
aka the sun's discrimination makes air go woosh
When one area cools, the air their contracts, when another area warms, it expands
When it contacts, it pulls, when it warms, it pushes.
According to the link in the top comment (sorry for caps, copied it out of the image): COOL AIR TRAVELS TOWARDS WARM AIR OVER LAND.
So the warm air does push, but it pushes upwards (rises). Cool, low pressure air, then fills the void.
This clarification brought to you by another non-expert in the field. Ha
To add to others, wind also is generated when a rain "microburst" occurs.This happens frequently in the southwest U.S.
A microburst is when a very large amount of water is dropped out of the clouds. The gaining rain speed pushes the air below it out of the way. The air is pushed outward horizontal to the ground, which in essence is a massive wall of wind.
Often in the Sonoron desert a microburst causes the wind to push a lot of dirt from the ground surface to be blown out with the wind. When this happens it's called a haboob. The wall of thick dust and particles can be up to a mile high and as wide as a city.
Below is a link to an image of a haboob over Phoenix, Arizona.
Thats interesting.
Wait a minute..... is that the photo
You
It's easier to think about it in terms of where is the wind going.
Air moves into adjacent regions that have lower pressure. It begins everywhere but is moving towards these areas of lower pressure.
All weather is a result of heat exchange and pressure differentials caused by an unequally heated atmosphere. (The side toward the sun is warmer.)
For mere mortals: various exposed land masses gets heated by sunlight, and the air in contact with that land gets heated too.
When air gets warmer it expands (because atoms move and collide faster). That makes it less dense, so colder and denser air (with its slower atoms) falls in under the warm air and pushes the warm air up. If the ground is still warmer then that cold air gets heated too.
When that happens just at one point it makes air move around that warm ground in a "donut shape", up in the center and out and down and back in.
When that happens at many different locations then those air movements collide with each other, and now we have complicated weather which takes big supercomputers to simulate.
Pressure differential from high and low pressure systems in the weather pattern.
Where does an ocean wave start?
All currents are circular when you zoom out far enough, and are driven by inequalities in energy. Inequalities in thermal energy, for wind, and wind energy, for waves. Inequalities in voltage drive electrical current, which is remarkable fluid like, in its behavior.
Terry Pratchett taught me that wind is caused by all of the trees waving about.
Now that one makes sense
After last night’s beans
Gods farts
Where does a circle start? Just pick a point on the cycle and go around from there.
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO...
The Coriolis force contributes to large-scale wind movements such as hurricanes.
I don't think it's relevant to the creation of the wind. Just its direction.
Uh, the sun? Wind is continuous
Based on the 1 shitty course in applied mathematics I nearly flunked, I imagine the velocity of wind is a solution to some kind of differential equation induced by the temperature, and since the sun's heat is moderately spread around (like you don't get a hyper-heated cmxcm square or something) these solutions have reasonable continuity properties, so that with 'one step to the right' you can feel slightly less wind, but not a huge difference. Maybe five thousand of these can take you from strong wind to no wind at all.
The Wind Waker
With the beginning of the universe, mate.
its about temperature, hot air rises. the air changing temperature causes abrupt movement in columns of air