There are some places we sail where just one look at the sky, or the way the air feels, lets us know that we’re probably going to be in for a thunderstorm shellacking sometime that day—the summertime Chesapeake Bay comes to mind. But if we’re looking for a more precise way of determining the potential for convention, as well as how severe the wind it produces might be, there are several tools available to sailors that bear exploring and many environmental factors to consider.
Sailors and weather forecasters rely on weather models to help them predict what’s coming, but computer models have difficulty predicting weather events that occur on small scales of time or distance (see “Weather Window: Forecast Models,” May 2023). Convective storms and the wind they generate are a good example of this.
Wind due to convection is caused by temperature differences; air that is warmer than its surrounding air mass rises, and air that’s cooler than its surrounding air mass falls. A group of air molecules moving up or down in
