How does air movement affect weather?

1 Answer
Oct 2, 2015

Apart from wind storms, which should be self explanatory for this, the primary affect air movement has on weather is advection.

Explanation:

Advection is the lateral movement of a property of the atmosphere. Thermal advection, thickness advection and vorticity advection are the main ones that are looked at in meteorology.

Thermal advection is the lateral movement of warm or cold air. Thickness advection is related to thermal advection but encompasses a vertical extent in the atmosphere. Essentially is the the thermal advection from several layers of the atmosphere (usually the surface of the Earth up to the 500mb surface which is about 18,000 ft).

Vorticity advection is the lateral change of vorticity, which in it's most simple term is how "spinning" the air is.

An accurate explanation of advection and how it affects the weather in detail would require several chapters of writing. In fact I would hazard a guess that there are entire textbooks available regarding advection in Meteorology.