Wednesday, February 1, 2012

It recently rained and the cars where covered in pollen which had blown from scandinava.How!?

There's lots of stuff blowing up from lots of places. Dust storms in the Sahara desert blow tons into the Atlantic ocean. Volcanos in the southwestern Pacific will color the North American skies. The atmosphere has a lot of currents. The jet stream is one, prevailing winds are another.



The earth has bands of atmospheric rotation. I live in a zone called the prevailing westerlies. Most of the winds tend to flow in a west to east direction. If you are in North America, that Scandinavian pollen will have traveled the width of Asia, at its widest, raining down all along the way. This shows the global nature of this zone of air flow.



Somethings are simply too big for those zones to contain, in 1883 when Indonesian volcano Krakatoa exploded, its ash was seen in England. May I suggest an article by Timothy Miner in the May 1, 2003 issue of Flying Safety. Not all pollen, dust, pollutants travel that far. Some are not as aerodynamic as others, and sometimes winds are not as strong when the pollination is taking place. Still, there are times when smoke, ash, pollen, and other things can travel long, long distances when they are usually confined to very short areas.



If you have ever seen photos of great dust storms, consider that we call them sand storms, but the sand is only blowing up a very few feet from the ground. Those enormous clouds of dirt are the dust the wind carries high into the air, taking them miles and miles away from their source, while the original sand the dust was shaken out of has fallen but a few fee from its original disturbance. Pollen works that way too.


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