Going back to Grade 5

I wear many hats in my new job and that’s fine by me; variety is the spice of life! Once a week, I do my best to get out and speak with school children. It makes for a busy day, but it also makes my day. The students I visit are usually in grade 5 and studying the weather unit.

During a visit earlier this month, a young boy asked, “What is wind?”

Great question! Wind is the horizontal movement of air and

is caused by variations in tem- perature and pressure. Simply put, wind is moving air.

On my way back to work I was trying to remember a poem we had to memorize in grade 5.

“When the wind is from the

North,

Fishermen dare not go forth. When the wind is from the South,

It blows the bait in the fish’s mouth.

When the wind is from the

East,

It’s neither fit for man nor beast.

But when the wind is from the west,

It is the time that they love best.”

We get more than our share of wind in Atlantic Canada and many people have said to me it seems to be getting windier. That’s a great observation. During the last 10 years, global wind power capacity has increased by 30 per cent each year.

Venture to guess what the windiest city in the world is? Apparently, it’s Dodge City, Kansas. What about the windiest planet? Neptune. The winds on Neptune blow at more than 2,000 kilometres per hour.