Advection: The Forgotten Weather Factor

From Dr. Tim Ball at Watts Up With That
In The Real World
The early Greeks had a better, more basic understanding of weather and climate than the people involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Indeed, the word climate derives from the Greek word klima, meaning inclination, referring to the climate conditions created by the angle of the Sun. They paid great attention to the wind, realizing its role in creating local, regional and seasonal conditions. They even erected a tower to the wind in Athens (Figure 1) with sculptures representing each major compass direction.

The Greeks focused on the more important horizontal movement of air, technically called advection or more commonly, wind. In the modern era people like C. W. Thornthwaite understood the role of wind as he considered, surface and air temperatures, insolation and wind speed, major factors affecting the potential for evaporation and evapotranspiration. More recently, Hans Jelbring’s 1998 doctoral thesis, Wind Controlled Climate was one of the few to draw attention to the critical role of wind.

Wind, Water, and Energy Transfer
It is not possible to identify critical points in the complex system that is weather and climate, but that is what the IPCC was set up to do. It began with the limited definition of climate change and continued with the selection of variables and mechanisms used in their computer models. It is possible to identify areas they omit that are critical to understanding, or at least make understanding impossible without their inclusion. Two of them are the phase changes of water and the related energy absorptions and releases involved, and the transport of that energy by the wind.
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