Prevailing wind

A prevailing wind is one which comes most frequently from a particular direction; round here the prevailing winds come off the sea, hence the poor bent over tree in the graveyard in my featured image. When we lived in Cambridge, we were very aware of the cold easterly winds which used to be so bitter and nasty, cycling to school was no fun when those winds prevailed. My dad used to talk a bout a Fen ‘blow’ – out in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, those flat open area of reclaimed farmland, the easterlies would whistle across, picking up topsoil and anything planted in it. He remembered seeing a hedge full of sugar beet; the wind had been so strong it had lifted the crop and deposited it in a hedge at the edge of the field. Now we are in the west, we get mostly westerlies.

I read a lot of adventure books as a child, often stories about sailing in the olden days, and a term which sounded particularly dreadful was ‘The Roaring Forties’; I had no idea properly what it was but I got a real sense of it because of the descriptive name! A prevailing wind blows most frequently across a particularly area or region and this is universal; in different regions of the Earth there are different prevailing wind directions, and apparently these depend on the type of general circulation of the atmosphere and also of what is called the latitudinal wind zones.One of these zones is the Roaring Forties which is in the North-West. here are all the names, so evocative: