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By Root 434 0

Persian invasion of Egypt in the fourth century B.C. The Khanate assault on Japan was called off when a typhoon sank half the fleet in 1275. In 1529 heavy rains and high winds fatally delayed the progress of the huge Ottoman army under Suleiman the Magnificent, which would otherwise have captured Vienna and dethroned the Habsburgs centuries before their time. Sixty years later the Spanish Armada went down to defeat because the winds conspired with the British to blow in the wrong direction. When a gale blew the Armada back into port and one of his advisers suggested it was an omen from the Almighty, Philip II responded with what historian Geoffrey Parker called "naked spiritual blackmail": "If this were an unjust war," Philip declared, "one could indeed take this storm as a sign from our Lord to cease offending Him. But being as just as it is, one cannot believe that he will disband [the armada], but rather grant it more favor."35

A French fleet sent to sack Boston in 1746 was destroyed by savage gales, once off the Bay of Biscay, a second time near Halifax; the hapless commander, dispirited by the debacle, fell on his sword in his cabin, and retired from history. Many a time the fate of the American Revolution turned on wind. The 1775 "Independence Hurricane" drowned about 4,000 British sailors just south of Newfoundland, which in turn affected the British presence in New England in the months that followed. In 1776 George Washington called off what might have been a disastrous attempt to take Boston from Imperial troops because a "hurrycane" (in the word of one of his junior officers) intervened. The same year a violent Atlantic nor'easter allowed him to escape from New York. And in the following year he defeated Cornwallis in a crucial battle whose fortunes turned when a north wind froze muddy roads along the Delaware and enabled the Americans to reposition their artillery. Two violent storms sealed the fate of the British troops trapped at Yorktown in 1781. And more recently too: In the Second World War several campaigns were won or lost when the harmattan, the hot wind of the desert, knocked out communications. Not to mention the D-day invasion itself, which hinged for an awful moment on a break in an Atlantic gale. And the country of Bangladesh was birthed in a typhoon: In 1970 a tropical cyclone hit Bangladesh, then still called East Pakistan, killing more than 300,000 people; the central government's mishandling of the crisis that followed was a prime reason for the eastern province to break away and form its own state.

Like the global wind systems, local winds are a complex and shifting amalgam of factors, including the presence of bodies of water nearby, the accelerating effect of narrowing valleys, and the presence of mountains. These may be small, a particular valley in a prevailing wind, or very large, the Sahara Desert, for example, which is as huge as the continental United States. The most common local winds are sea and land breezes, because land and sea heat up at different rates, and mountain and valley winds (katabatic and anabatic winds)—the Foehn, the Chinook, the Santa Ana, and many others—because valleys and areas of rock heat up faster on one side or the other, depending on the sun's position, which results in thermal lift on the sunlit side and a cool downdraft on the other. These winds can be powerful. "Local" winds can also be quite large: The monsoons of Southeast Asia are really an overscale form of the sea and land breeze.

In a way, hurricanes and tornadoes, indeed all storms, are local winds too, although they are traveling winds with no fixed address.

In the Mediterranean, locally unique winds have been mapped for millennia. The fine-grained permutations are almost endless. Corsica, for example, has been known to record a Force 6 or 7 gale on the west coast, calm on the east, and quite a different gale in the Strait of Bonifacio, places only a dozen miles apart.36 This has much to do with the presence of many islands, which distort and redirect winds. "The heat of an island creates new