noun
definition
A westerly wind or storm.
Examples of westerlies in a Sentence
And other factors do not appear to favor persistent mild westerlies.
The front will press across the UK during Friday, bringing westerlies.
A strong Asian summer monsoon is preceded by weak upper tropospheric westerlies over south Asia and vise versa.
Protected from the prevailing south westerlies by the great mass of The Lizard, the peninsula runs almost due south from Tregony.
Air moving from the high-latitude sides of the same high-pressure belts toward the poles produces the prevailing westerlies.
The ranges of the Rocky Mountains in their turn receive some rainfall from the passing winds, but it is only after the westerlies are reinforced by a moist indraft from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlanticthe result of summer or of cyclonic inflowthat rainfall increases to a sufficient measure on the lower lands to support agriculture without irrigation.
The prevailing winds respond to the stronger poleward temperature gradients of winter by rising to a higher velocity and a more frequent and severer cyclonic storminess; and to the weaker gradients of summer by relaxing to a lower velocity with fewer and weaker cyclonic storms; but furthermore the northern zone occupied by the prevailing westerlies expands as the winds strengthen in winter, and shrinks as they weaken in summer; thus the stormy westerlies, which impinge upon the north-western coast and give it plentiful rainfall all through the year, in winter reach southern California and sweep across part of the Gulf of Mexico and Florida; it is for this reason that southern California has a rainy winter season, and that the states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico are visited in winter by occasional intensified cold winds, inappropriate to their latitude.
The Pacific ranges, standing transverse to the course of the prevailing westerlies near the Pacific Ocean, are of the greatest importance in this respect; it is largely by reason of the barrier that they form that the tempering effects of the Pacific winds are felt for so short a distance inland in winter, and that the heat centre is displaced in summer so far towards the western coast.
In California the effect of the strong equatorward turn of the summer winds is to produce a dry season; but in the states along the Gulf of Mexico and especially in Florida the withdrawal of the stormy westerlies in favor of the steadier trade winds (here turned somewhat toward the continental interior, as explained below) results in an increase of precipitation.