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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

The chinook wind takes its name from the Chinook Indians who lived on the Pacific coast. Also known as the "snow eater," the term stands for an unseasonably warm, dry wind that blows down from the Rockies. As correspondent Curt Nickisch discovered overseas recently, this weather phenomenon is found around the world.

In southern California, they're Santa Ana winds. In Argentina, they call it zonda.

JUCH: In Italy and Yugoslavia and Slowenia and Croatia it's called bora, and in some places, Greece or Spain it's called sirocco.

Andrea Juch studies meteorology at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. There they call it the foehn. The same word they use for hair dryer.

JUCH: It's just a few days. Sometimes even just one day. And you have it at the beginning of winter and suddenly it's very warm. And then you feel this warm wind and you feel like summer. And the next day it's winter again.

Though the warm dry winds have different names around the globe, Juch says they're all Katabatic winds, which means they blow downslope of mountains. The air spilling over the top expands and dries as it falls, warming it 5 1/2 degrees for every thousand feet of descent.

JUCH: A lot of people don't like it, because they get headaches and all sorts of things; they get depressed.

No one knows exactly why these dramatic mood changes are associated with chinook winds. They can also cause avalanches. And come spring, the land is often much drier - making farming more difficult.

In southern Austria, I'm Curt Nickisch.

Curt Nickisch, when not in Austria, watches the weather in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported generously by Subaru of America. Thanks today to executive engineer Sean Doucette.