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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. A region's prevailing and dominant winds are the result of global patterns of movement in the Earth's atmosphere. [1] In general, winds are predominantly easterly at low latitudes globally.
During the Age of Sail, the pattern of prevailing winds made various points of the globe easy or difficult to access, and therefore had a direct effect on European empire-building and thus on modern political geography. For example, Manila galleons could not sail into the wind at all. [4] Edmond Halley's map of the trade winds, 1686
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
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 ...
The winds that flow to the west (from the east, easterly wind) at the ground level in the Hadley cell are called the trade winds. Though the Hadley cell is described as located at the equator, it shifts northerly (to higher latitudes) in June and July and southerly (toward lower latitudes) in December and January, as a result of the Sun's ...
The largest ocean gyres are wind-driven, meaning that their locations and dynamics are controlled by the prevailing global wind patterns: easterlies at the tropics and westerlies at the midlatitudes. These wind patterns result in a wind stress curl that drives Ekman pumping in the subtropics (resulting in downwelling) and Ekman suction in ...
They also had to discover the pattern of winds and currents that would carry them where they wanted to go. During the Age of Sail, winds and currents determined trade routes and therefore influenced European imperialism and modern political geography. For an outline to the main wind systems see Global wind patterns.
An image of the Gulf Stream's path and its related branches The average number of days per year with precipitation The average amount of sunshine yearly (hours). The climate of western Europe is strongly conditioned by the Gulf Stream, which keeps mild air (for the latitude) over Northwestern Europe in the winter months, especially in Ireland, the United Kingdom and coastal Norway.