As we noted yesterday in Weather Eye, many parts of the world have local winds with such well-known characteristics that they have been given special names. And some carry little stories that are interesting.
The Chinook, for example, is a warm dry wind that sweeps down the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains in the early spring, and it is named after the Chinook Indians - it blew from "over the Chinook camp". It is also so superbly efficient at clearing away the snow of the harsh American winter that it is often called the "snow-eater".
In the early spring of 1886, a young American artist, Charles M. Russell, was eking out a living as an unknown range rider in Montana. His employers "back east", the story goes, were worried about the effects of the harsh winter on their livestock, and asked for a report. Instead of a pen, Russell used his brush, and sent a painting. Waiting for the Chinook shows the Great Plains thick with snow, and a few starving coyotes, too weak to kill, circling hungrily around the last surviving steer, waiting for it to die from cold. The steer's only hope of survival is a timely onset of the benevolent Chinook.
And then there is the Kamikaze wind, the "Divine Wind" of Japan. In 1281 the Mongol Empire sent a naval expedition to invade that country. As the Mongol fleet approached Japan, a typhoon hit the island of Kyushu. Desperate to escape, the Mongols made for open water, but a tidal surge advancing on Hakata Bay swept the hapless vessels backwards to the shore: more than half the invaders were immediately killed or drowned, and those that made the shore were slaughtered by the defending Japanese.
The exploit has been celebrated in Japanese folklore as an intervention by the gods on their behalf. The timely storm became the "Kamikaze", the "Divine Wind", a symbol that the Japanese would always overcome their foreign enemies, no matter what the odds. Some 600 years later the persistence of this belief was evident when "kamikaze" pilots crashed their explosive-laden aircraft onto American ships in the Pacific.
Sometimes, of course, such stories turn out to be untrue. For many years the hot, dry, dusty Santa Ana wind of California was believed to have originated from an association with the ruthless victor of the Alamo in 1836, the Mexican General Antonio de Santa Anna. But this theory had to be abandoned when historical records demonstrated clearly that neither the general nor his famous dust-raising cavalry had ever been in the vicinity of southern California.