It always seems to be extra windy in the spring here in the White Mountains, but is it getting extra- extra windy this year? High winds in burned-over areas can pose a risk with dead trees or just branches getting blown across trails, roads, and unfortunately onto campsites too. Many people travel with chainsaws just in case a big tree falls across their only road out of the woods. A tow strap can be used to drag the tree out of the way if it's small enough and you have a secure anchor point on your vehicle. Even Paul Bunyan would choose a tree saw over an ax since sawing is easier than chopping.

And winds can make dehydration problems worse in dry conditions for hikers while moist conditions and winds are a recipe for hypothermia, even during the summer months at high altitudes. A windbreaker's weight can be worth more than gold in some situations. 

High winds are not just a problem in the woods. You can often see white caps on many local lakes, making kayaking and boating more unstable in cold waters. Motor boaters who may not be familiar with the lower power of electric trolling motors (which are required on most White Mountain lakes) can get caught on the downwind side of a lake without enough power to get back to the landing or dock. This can turn into a memorable lesson in the rule of geometry which says the distance of a circumference around a lake is much, much longer than a diameter straight through the middle of the lake back to the landing, especially when you are walking and pulling a boat against the wind. Planning your lake tour with a tailwind for the way home might just keep your boots and oars dry! When using paddle power on the lake, it's even more important not to overestimate your own body's batteries, or the stamina of the least fit person in your group of kayakers, unless you're into towing a “kayak convoy” into a stiff headwind. 

So it is obvious that our spring winds can affect us directly. But is the wind causing our current drought situation or is it just one more symptom of the drought, like less rainfall and snow-pack. Unfortunately, that answer is more difficult to answer than whether the egg or the chicken came first! But meteorologists do know quite a bit about what causes winds to whip up in certain areas at specific times of the year. 

Wind could be thought of in the simplest terms as just the diffusion of air molecules. That doesn't take the sting out of a northerly gust during a snowstorm hiking the Mount Baldy Trail in an exposed portion without any spruce or fir to block the wind. OK then, so what is diffusion exactly? We experience diffusion every day when the aroma of our meals emanates gradually from the kitchen to the farthest reaches of the house and beyond sometimes. Diffusion is the movement of the food aroma molecules coming from the stovetop where they are in a very high concentration to other parts of the house where the food aroma molecules are in a lower concentration. 

Wind is the movement of air molecules from an area of higher concentration to lower concentration, as in from a high-pressure air mass to a lower pressure air mass. As the name implies, a higher pressure air mass has more air molecules in the same volume as a lower pressure mass, so air (wind) moves from the high-pressure concentration to the lower pressure concentration. 

This is how large-scale winds and storm fronts form, but local winds can be caused by geographic features such as mountains and shorelines. And the rotation of the Earth not only causes all toilets in the northern hemisphere to always drain in a counter-clockwise whirlpool (you haven't noticed?), but this rotation can impart the “Coriolis Effect” into weather patterns also, but not in all situations depending on arrangements of the air masses and their temperatures. 

So what causes the air to have different pressures? The sun. Actually, it's the way that the sun heats up our Earth more in some areas, like the equator and dark land masses, and less in others, like water and the polar regions. Since the sun heats up the equator region the most, that air expands and becomes more buoyant and less dense like a hot air balloon, travels north and south of the equator, cools, and then drops back down to sea level. 

This circulation causes wind zones at different latitudes that can be reliable and predictable for sailors. The Westerly Zone allowed explorers from Europe and Africa to reliably reach the spice markets of the East Indies and Australia, while the Easterly Trade winds were used to sail from Europe to North America and from South America to Polynesia. The trick was staying out of the “doldrums” zone straddling the equator, where winds were calm and moving vertically more than horizontally. 

Arizona is located in a circular band that covers the southern half of the US that is called the “horse latitudes”, where many deserts have formed in other parts of the globe. Air that was heated over the equator ends up cooling enough to begin falling as dry air over the southern US. At the same time, air masses that are dried and cooled by the north pole also drop down on top of us. However, as we know during our summers, monsoons develop when high-pressure air masses to our north or east, and unstable weather to the south creates the predictable daily moisture being allowed to feed from the south. This instability makes the Sonoran desert one of the wettest deserts in the world. 

Our location also prevents large cold and warm fronts from clashing over us, which are the cause of tornadoes and days-long overcast rainy conditions. The mixing of these different temperatures that causes extreme shear winds needed to form tornadoes just doesn't occur that often in Arizona. Powerful downdrafts from monsoon thunderstorms are technically different but can cause the same damage in small areas. Instead of long frontal squall lines where air masses of different temperatures collide and mix for miles and miles, we usually have the “popcorn” smaller localized storms that form from humid and unstable storms when air pressures drop suddenly. 

So why is it windier in the spring in the White Mountains? Mainly because it's a season of transition when the jet stream tends to move from a southern route to more north. The ground surface is also getting heated more and causing more turbulence at lower elevations, which allows the higher elevation fast winds to mix more at the surface. Single engine pilots in un-pressurized cabins have been able to find the jet stream over Arizona by checking different altitudes, sometimes as low as 14,000 feet. 

Not only are global forces working on our local weather in the spring but the ground winds can also be accelerated coming up from the hot desert over the Mogollon Rim and squeezed through canyons. Often, these winds are prevented from ascending very high over the top of the rim by a layer of stable air that keeps it low to the ground and concentrated. This upper layer of air can actually push down on the air mass as it descends in altitude, accelerating the wind velocity even more. So wind rising up over the Mogollon Rim and the White Mountains can actually accelerate as it moves east into the Little Colorado River Valley and down into Round Valley. This also happens over the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, causing increased winds on the eastern slopes. Since mountain ranges and ridges can squeeze the moisture out of any passing clouds due to their cooling effect, the leeward side is not only windier, but drier in many cases. 

Our wonderful White Mountain winds can make it a challenge to hear those turkeys responding or to make that dry fly land anywhere but in an alder. The winds can stir up the juniper and pine pollen 

creating flooded sinuses, and the winds can toss our caps and dry our eyes. 

But the most important thing to keep in mind during our windy and dry spring season is to make sure we don't have any fire starts that could quickly get out of control and put our firefighters at risk. Please obey all fire restrictions until they are lifted, not after the first light rain in your neighborhood. Our area is too valuable to risk.