What Is Wind?
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Understanding the true nature of wind helps us to better understand windsports and weather. In the article Weather Forecasting For Wind Driven Water Sports in WNY we looked closely at practical weather applications to help us get more and longer sessions on the water. In this article we will explore the physics side of what wind really is. Meteorologists explain wind mostly through pressure gradients. They say that the sun unevenly heats the surface of the Earth, and as the warmer air expands and rises it creates areas of low pressure which allow relatively cooler air to rush in to fill the void thereby creating wind. The Coriolis effect deflects that wind to the right in the northern hemisphere giving pressure systems a circular structure. This model of wind is a very useful and convenient way to look at wind for purposes of telling a computer how to apply current weather conditions to software programs that have analyzed decades of weather patterns so that a future forecast can be predicted for your day of windsports at the beach. In this way this model is quite useful. But, this is NOT what wind actually IS.

If we look at wind as pressure gradients then we have to ask why the pressure gradient doesn't just quickly even out and come to equilibrium resulting in no wind. How and where is the energy stored that allows wind to last for long periods of time? What is that mechanism of energy storage? How could you get a gust of wind out of a pressure gradient in a very localized area? Much of it doesn't make sense under the pressure gradient model. Wind is much better explained as charge gradients rather than pressure gradients. What is charge? Charge is the amount and movement of electrons and protons in a system. We know that the Earth has a net negative charge (electrons), and we know that the atmosphere is composed of hydronium ions (protons) that give it a net positive charge. As the sun hits land and water on the surface of the Earth it causes more hydronium ions (protons) to be excited up into the atmosphere from the energy of the sun thereby establishing a charge gradient. Biophysicist Gerald Pollack explains that those protons diminish with increasing altitude as he has illustrated in the diagrams below. This has been confirmed many times through scientific analysis.

Before we look at how charge gradients create wind let's look at the magnitude of force that charge provides? Most people don't realize the massive magnitude of force created by charge. Noble Prize winner and famous physicist Richard Feynman conducted a fascinating thought experiment and calculation to illustrate the massive amount of force that charge creates. Imagine that you have a man and a woman, and you remove 1% of the electrons from each person. Now each person has a net positive charge, so they will repel each other as we all know that like charges repel one another. Imagine the man laying on his back on the ground and the woman floating one meter above him due to the repelling force of their like charges. How much weight would you have to put on the woman's back to keep her from being repelled up farther away from the man? Feynman correctly calculated that you need to put a weight on the woman's back equal to the weight of the Earth. That is how massively powerful charge is! Now we can begin to imagine how charge can have such a profound affect on sustained wind and wind gusts compared to pressure systems alone.

​Now think about what happens in the diurnal pattern of day versus night. During the day the infrared light from the sun drives evaporation of water from the Earth's surface and from bodies of water thus increasing the amount of protons (hydronium ions) in the atmosphere. But at night you don't have that energy from the sun, so there are far fewer protons in the atmosphere. At night the positive charges drop down closer to the Earth's surface and in lesser amounts. Thus, during the day you have a high electric field and at night you have a low electric field, as shown below. This too has been confirmed many times through scientific analysis.

This graph shows the relationship between electric field intensity and time of day. Notice how the intensity of the electric field increases as the sun intensity increases with time of day.

Now notice how there is a very abrupt gradient of light and dark on the Earth's surface in the diagram below:

That sharp gradient of light and dark creates a sharp gradient of electric field intensity where positive charges in the atmosphere build in the location experiencing sun, while the location in dark has few positive charges in the atmosphere. The result of this positive charge gradient is WIND. Remember the massive magnitude of force that charge generates from the example above. The sun is literally charging up a battery. The sun is the cation and the Earth is the anion.

​The positive charges flow from the area of high positive charge to the area of low positive charge and carry the air particles with them. This happens on a large global scale, and it also happens on a small local scale like near the lake where you windsurf or kiteboard. If something on the Earth creates a region of high positive charges while the adjacent region has fewer positive charges then there will be wind. In the Buffalo, NY area this happens often where there is wind at one beach but there is no wind at another beach just 10 miles away. It can be influenced by nearby industry, cities, farmland, forests, lakes, rivers, quarries, airports, and more, that create differences in local charge.

I would further posit that this phenomenon is also the mechanism behind diurnal mixing. At night the wind generally moves up to a higher altitude, and we generally feel less wind at the surface of the Earth. During the day the wind moves back down to the surface of the Earth. As wind athletes we clearly notice this on most days at the beach when we observe the breeze coming up around 11am and then retreating in the evening. It's pretty consistent. Meteorologists explain this through temperature differences. But take another look at the image directly above. The positive charges move from the area of high concentration of positive to the area of low concentration of positive charge as the positive charges in the high concentration area will repel each other. But those positive charges will also be attracted to the negative charges in the surface of the Earth below the area with the low concentration of positive charges. So the flow of charge in the image will be to left but also downward as the negative charge attracts the positive. In this way we can explain diurnal mixing as the wind is directed back down to the surface of the Earth.

The situation becomes more complex as we enter clouds and rain into the discussion. Clouds have a net negative charge, and the Earth's surface has a net negative charge. The repelling force is what keeps the clouds in the sky. More negative charge in the cloud will push the cloud higher. As the cloud gains positive charge due to weather processes it will move lower toward the Earth's surface through the inductive force. The more positive charge that a cloud gains the more the negative charge of the Earth will pull the cloud closer to the Earth's surface. Eventually there will be enough attractive force to pull raindrops out of the cloud. Raindrops fall to the Earth at a speed that is 10x greater than they could fall due to gravitational acceleration alone. The 10x increased speed is due to the pull caused by opposite charge attraction. Of course this phenomenon will be affected by the process of wind that we discussed above, and it then becomes quite complicated.

This is a very fun and interesting way to fundamentally understand wind. Charge is very likely the force that is foundationally responsible for airplane flight, the flight of your foil, and the force generated by your windsurfing sail. During my undergraduate physics degree we learned that Bernoulli's principle explains flight by its relationship between speed in a fluid and the resulting pressure, kind of like how meteorologists explain wind. It's a very useful and convenient model, but it's not the reality. Charge is the reality, and it controls so many things in the universe. I was studying the mechanism by which charge causes and cures atherosclerotic cardiovascular heart disease when I stumbled upon the research showing how the same mechanism causes wind. Over the next few months I hope to have time to further look into the effect of charge on foils and sails. I love this stuff!