Suddenly a breezy sunny afternoon became a gusty cold one. In this part of the world, just dialing down the sun a little bit will make you reach for a jacket. And then the wind! Below: this is what some folks call “walking rain” when they see it dragging across a mountain range, but to me that means the sheets of rain from distant thunderstorms. Pretty much the same thing, just a difference of degree.
Whenever the descending moisture evaporates before it hits the ground (very common in this land of low humidity), the surrounding air grows turbulent and windy. I figure there’s super-cooling in the region of the evaporation, and the resulting cold air falls rapidly to the ground, splashing out in all directions and producing gusty local winds. Besides common sense, what turned me on to this was noticing that in northern New Mexico, at least, the wind always seems to be coming from rainstorms, when we have them. Even if the thing is passing straight on by, the wind blows like it’s going to come right at you.
[Hey, a couple of big red-and-black ants just walked across my desk!]
Maybe thunderstorms do that other places and I never noticed. But in Maryland, it wasn’t that way. The wind would slowly build in your direction from a featureless wide sky, stronger and stronger, and then this murderous squall line would burst out of the haze and kill everything in its path.
But the wind only blew one direction, and if it was coming at you in July, watch out.
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