(04-07-2024, 04:25 PM)F2d5thCav Wrote: The only somewhat unnerving thing about the last eclipse I went outside for was that as the darkness closed in, a wind suddenly picked up.
Cheers
That's fairly common. I noticed it during the 2017 eclipse here.
What happens is, the moon's shadow blocks not just the sun's light, but also the heat that accompanies it. The temperature drop from that, however slight, causes that air in the shadow to have a reduced air pressure. Because of that reduced air pressure, air comes flowing in from warmer areas, and you get wind.
Same thing happens in these mountains just about every day. Down in the hollers, there is more shade because the mountainsides block the sunlight. But the sun comes up, and warms the air at the mountain tops, causing the higher pressure to run down the slopes to attempt to fill the relative vacuum of the shady hollers, and we get an east wind.
In the evening, it reverses as the hollers heat up from the sunlight they get between about 10 am and 4 pm, and the air tries to fly out of them back up to the lower pressure mountaintops.
.