Waves of Air
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow for the Weather Notebook. Today Jan DeBlieu offers her perspective on our atmospheric ocean.

At 35,000 feet, the altitude of jet streams and jet planes, it's possible to see something no soaring hawk has ever glimpsed: the top side of the clouds. On a cross-country flight one day, I looked down to an overcast sky and noticed a pattern that seemed oddly familiar. The cloud cover was sculpted into even ridges that extended to the horizon. It seemed for all the world that I was looking down at ripples of sand formed by water on a beach.

Air flows just as water does, and this strange similarity shows itself in unexpected ways, like the ridges I saw in those clouds. Currents of air and water are so much alike, in fact, that an EPA lab here in North Carolina tests air pollution flow patterns in tanks of water.

Think of what it means that air moves like water. It means a tree on a windy hillside feels the same shaping currents as a boulder in a creek. It means that ocean currents tug and pull at swimmers in the same way that air currents tug at migrating birds. It means that as the wind swirls from high pressure to low, it sometimes causes insects to bunch up, like flotsam riding on ocean waves. And it means, finally, that we humans are anomalies. We are clunky beings, hobbled by gravity, especially compared to the diverse fauna that swims all around us in the oceans of water and air.

Jan DeBlieu is a writer and commentator, from Manteo, North Carolina. The Weather notebook is a production of the Mount Washington observatory.