💨 WIND: WHY AIR MOVES
PAGE 1 OF 5, WHAT IS "WIND" ANYWAY?
NOT MAGIC
WIND = AIR IN MOTION
You cannot see the wind, but you see what it does, it rustles trees, whips up waves, cools you when you are sweaty, and can knock over bins when it is strong. In science words: wind is the horizontal movement of air (vertical "wind" is more often called an updraught in storms). Topic 5 taught that air presses down. Here we learn: when pressure is not the same in two places, the atmosphere tries to even things out, and that push , along with the planet spinning and drag at the ground, is why air flows as wind.
📐 TWO NUMBERS
We report wind direction (where the wind is coming from, a "northerly" blows from the north) and speed (knots, km/h, or mph).
WHOOSH!
FLAGS
Flags stream downstream of the source direction
DUST
Dust, spray, and birds show you the flow of parcels