Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The wind belts girdling the planet are organised into three cells in each hemisphere—the Hadley cell, the Ferrel cell, and the polar cell. Those cells exist in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The vast bulk of the atmospheric motion occurs in the Hadley cell.
The term originally derives from the early fourteenth century sense of trade (in late Middle English) still often meaning "path" or "track". [2] The Portuguese recognized the importance of the trade winds (then the volta do mar, meaning in Portuguese "turn of the sea" but also "return from the sea") in navigation in both the north and south Atlantic Ocean as early as the 15th century. [3]
The westerlies (blue) and trade winds (yellow and brown) The general atmospheric circulation. Trade winds (red), westerlies (white) and the South Pacific anticyclone (blue) [1] 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.
Winds are part of Earth's atmospheric circulation. The westerlies (blue) and trade winds (yellow and brown) Global surface wind vector flow lines colored by wind speed from June 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011. In meteorology, prevailing wind in a region of the Earth's surface is a surface wind that blows predominantly from a particular direction ...
Note, winds are named based on where they came from. The polar easterlies are one of the five primary wind zones, known as wind belts, that make up our atmosphere's circulatory system. This particular belt of wind begins at approximately 60 degrees north and south latitude and reaches to the poles.
Several other natural philosophers independently forwarded explanations for the global distribution of winds soon after Hadley's 1735 proposal. In 1746, Jean le Rond d'Alembert provided a mathematical formulation for global winds, but disregarded solar heating and attributed the winds to the gravitational effects of the Sun and Moon.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate ...