Tag Archives: climate

Global wind, precipitation, ocean current patterns

The most fundamental reason that Earth has wind is because it is a sphere (basically; it "bulges" slightly at the equator due to its rotation). Differential heating creates the winds, which are then rerouted by Earth's rotation and land-sea boundaries. In turn, winds influence precipitation patterns and indirectly drive ocean currents. This post will walk through the basics. If you don't want to read the whole thing, you can skip to the summary. Read more

Very awesome animated map of current global wind conditions

Head on over to earth.nullschool.net to see animated global wind conditions and be prepared to spend a few minutes just staring; it's very hypnotic. How does it stack up to what you would expect wind patterns to look like? One thing that popped out to me was the clearly northward position of the ITCZ relative to the equator. Read more