The Names of the Wind Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Winds have played (and still play) such a prominent role in the development of human civilization that, not surprisingly, they have often been named, personified, and even worshipped as deities. Many of the names used in the Mediterranean region date from thousands of years ago, when the Ancient Greeks conflated the concept of the four cardinal points with that of the four winds, thus creating the classical 12-wind compass rose. In the Middle Ages, Mediterranean seafarers came up with their own version of the compass rose, which included eight winds.

Mistral (also known as maestro or maestrale - all names meaning "masterly") and libeccio (or lebeche) are two of the winds featured in the medieval compass rose. The former is a cold, northwesterly wind that blows along the western Mediterranean coast in late autumn and winter; the latter - known and feared for causing violent storms at sea - is a southwesterly wind whose Italian name means "Libyan". Foehn is a generic name given to a warm, dry downslope wind, originally applied to winds blowing in the European Alps - particularly in southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where it is known for raising temperatures of up to 14 ºC (25 ºF), and rapidly melting any snow cover. Its name comes from "Favonius", the name of the Roman god of the west wind. The Chinook of North America's Pacific Northwest - named after an indigenous people of that region - is also a foehn-type wind that brings rain to the coastal areas, but quickly melts snow in the interior. For this reason, it is also called "snow-eater".

As its name suggests, the pampero is a cold, southwesterly wind that blows from the Andes over the pampas, the low grasslands found in Uruguay and Argentina. Though more common in winter, it occasionally blows at the end of summer, marking the end of periods of intense heat. The buran (a name of Turkic origin meaning "storm") is also a cold, very strong wind of Central Asia, Siberia, and Northern China, where it brings sandstorms in summer, and blizzards in winter. In Alaska, this snow-laden northeasterly wind is know as burga.

The four remaining winds all have something in common: they are hot, dry winds that cause severe sand and dust storms in arid or semiarid regions of the world such as the Sahara and Arabian Deserts (simoom, meaning "poison" in Arabic), West Africa (harmattan, etymology uncertain), the Persian Gulf (shamal, meaning "north" in Arabic), and southern Australia (Brickfielder, named after a Sydney district). When these winds blow, temperatures soar (up to 54 ºC/129 ºF in the Middle East) and humidity plummets. As one can imagine, all these winds can wreak havoc with everyday life: being outside can put one at risk because of the unhealthy, dust-laden air and the danger of heatstroke.

The remaining 15 words listed in the quiz come from other branches of Earth science than meteorology. Lahar (a violent mudflow), caldera (a depression formed by a volcanic eruption) and tsunami (also known as tidal wave) are all related to volcanic or seismic activity. Arroyo (a dry watercourse that fills with water after rain), erg (a flat area of windswept sand in a desert), butte (an isolated hill with steep sides), karst (topography from dissolved carbonate rocks), moraine (an accumulation of glacial debris) and tombolo (a sandy isthmus connecting an island to the mainland) are all types of landforms. Bayou (a body of water in a low-lying area) and billabong (a kind of oxbow lake) refer to bodies of water, while permafrost is soil that remains frozen for two years or longer. Chaparral (shrubland found in California), bushveldt (subtropical woodland of Southern Africa) and taiga (also known as boreal forest) are names of biomes or ecoregions.