Connected by Chaos
When life feels chaotic, we take a step back to see the full picture. We do the same to understand chaos on our planet — but the full picture has layers woven together by the Earth’s most ferocious force: the wind.
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When you consider the entirety of human history, seeing our planet from space is a pretty new concept. We’re quite privileged to have this vantage point. Not only does it put our place in the universe into perspective, it also allows us to see weather events forming deep over the ocean — where no eyes on land can see — giving us more time to prepare. Taking a step back for a better perspective applies to the intricate ecosystems on Earth too.
If you’re standing on the ground in Africa’s Sahara Desert, you’ll feel the wind whip up sandstorms and see how it forms vast seas of dunes. But if you’re sitting in a NASA office, watching orbital satellite images, a new perspective emerges. Modern satellite technology shows how Saharan dust rides a wind current across the Atlantic Ocean — roughly 4,800 km, the driving distance between Winnipeg and Guatemala — then lands in the Amazon Rainforest. This epic journey is integral to biodiversity. The phosphorous-rich dust fertilizes the forest.
Solving this puzzle taught us how the wind shapes our environment in surprising ways, while also exposing how life flourishes through delicately woven layers. For thousands of years dust travelled the ocean to a distant land — encouraging the perfect conditions for a lush rainforest. The Amazon lacks phosphorous naturally, so when wind conditions change and more rain falls near the Sahara; vegetation growth increases and obstructs the sand’s path, leading to less nutrients reaching the Amazon.
Though the wind may seem chaotic to a single person standing in the street, stepping back reveals a more cohesive picture. Every gust is like a spinning gear in the great machine of our planet, every breeze a part of an intricate puzzle; a delicate system whirring non-stop for millennia, locked in a series of chaotic loops we think we predict accurately — until we don’t.
The meteorological community is divided on recent environmental changes. Some say winds are slowing down, dubbed the Global Stilling; others say they’re speeding up, causing more extreme weather events. In 2024, Hurricanes Helene and Milton rocked the southern United States, and a violent tornado in Greenfield, Iowa whipped debris so high it landed in the neighbouring county. Either way, it feels like we’re living through a new natural disaster every month. Is it climate change, or do we simply notice more due to satellite imagery and our knack for populating available land?
To know if wind patterns are changing, we must first have clear and concise historical data to measure against. Cue Patrick (Pat) McCarthy, a retired meteorologist who’s outrun over 40 tornadoes but can’t shake his scientific duties. Currently Vice President of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) in Winnipeg, he still writes and contributes to many papers, studies, and field projects.
“Our lifetime is a short window of observation, and we haven’t been very good at measuring stuff in the past,” said Pat. “Historical weather information from 200 years ago is a mess. There hasn’t been a lot of consistency.”
Global weather data is often inaccurate as it depends when and where you’re measuring, and how your tools are calibrated. Weather changes by the minute and can measure entirely differently a mere kilometre away. Our modern solution involves weather stations across the globe releasing weather balloons in conjunction with passing satellites. This data is then shared, allowing for real-time comparisons and analysis. The Atmospheric Science students at the University of Manitoba contribute to this collaborative effort when severe summer weather is expected, providing essential forecasting data for the Red River Valley.
Manitoban educational institutions have a rich and storied meteorological history, according to UM Today, which comes as no surprise since the Great Plains offer little to obstruct the wind’s path. In 1874, a college in the North End of Winnipeg inscribed the following words on one of their first wind measuring tools: “This register of the winds, one of the latest triumphs of science and art, has been planted on her natal place, the earliest centre of civilization in this lonely and boundless land.“
This poetic and stirring dedication shows how deeply people are affected by and connected to the wind. There is mastery and beauty in the pursuit of understanding nature. Pat knows this as well. As a young man in the early 80s, Pat studied Fine Arts at the University of Alberta. The chaotic nature of storms and the serenity of calm clouds inspired him, becoming a common theme in his paintings. Through sheer serendipity, the Fine Arts and Geology departments neighboured each other.
Pat often wandered the hall to admire wind and weather maps, which piqued the interest of a certain meteorology professor. After a rousing discussion about the wind, the professor wondered why he didn’t recognize Pat from any of his classes. “Oh, I’m in Fine Arts! I just love the weather, that’s all,” he said.
The professor laughed and took Pat under his wing, convincing him to pivot to Meteorology — a field of study Pat always considered a pipe dream, unaware he could find a fulfilling career studying the very thing that inspired so much of his art.
“Wind is actually quite simple, it’s all related to air pressure,” said Pat. “If pressure is rising, winds will be calm and cool, but if pressure is low, winds will be warm — and then things get more chaotic.” Wind is always in motion, constantly trying to stabilize pressure by sucking cold air down towards the earth and hot air back up through the atmosphere. The atmosphere contains layers of gasses which surround and protect our planet from vast open space. The layer we’re most familiar with is the troposphere. It’s 20 kilometres from the ground up. Which is like stacking 13,333 hockey sticks from end to end, or 667 blue whales, reader’s choice. Every cloud you’ve ever seen existed inside the troposphere.
Above the troposphere is the stratosphere. Airplanes couldn’t reach this high until 1955, after the invention of pressurized cockpits in high-altitude reconnaissance planes. But the first people in the stratosphere were Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer way back in 1931, who went up in a simple passenger balloon instead of a fancy fighter jet.
Since our planet rotates while orbiting the solar system, the sun heats the Earth unevenly. This splits the troposphere into three sections of rotating cells: Hadley cells above the equator, Polar cells above the South and North poles, and Ferrel cells between the two.
The Hadley cells receive the most love from the sun, making the air here warm, a bit like steam from a boiling pot of water. This hot air rises towards the atmosphere to cool off before snaking down through the Ferrel cells. The Ferrel cells act like a fast-moving gear piece, grabbing the air flowing out from the Hadley cells and circulating it toward the Polar cells. The much cooler air above the Arctic and Antarctic act like an air conditioning system with no off switch — forever churning cooled air until it gets sucked back into the cycle again by jet streams near the Ferrel cells.
“The reason we know about jet streams at all is due to advancements in airplane technology,” said Pat. “In WWII, the Allies struggled to make it to Japan despite having new bomber planes capable of flying higher and faster than ever before, but they kept running into unusually strong and turbulent winds.” These fast-moving currents in the upper troposphere form when warm air meets cool air, and they always flow from west to east. Modern passenger planes use jet streams to fly faster when travelling east.
If Earth was as smooth as a marble, the Hadley, Ferrel, and Polar cells might distribute wind across the globe evenly and smoothly. But our world has mountains, bodies of water, and plains disrupting the wind’s path, making our weather chaotic and somewhat unpredictable. Even city structures can affect the flow — a phenomenon familiar to pilots.
Kit Hobden — an avid cyclist, aviation enthusiast, sailor, and duck hunter from Winnipeg — has a story or two about how the wind has foiled his plans. Growing up, Kit wanted to be a pilot like his uncle. “I started with flight simulators and always intended to get up in the sky one day,” he said. But flying is a lot more complicated than the simulations give credit for. Aside from the dangers of takeoff and landing, pilots also need to consider what they’re flying over and how instruments react in real time.
“My first flight was almost a dream-ruining moment. It was a disaster,” said Kit while describing his first flight over downtown Toronto, where he lived at the time. The wind acts strangely above a city. There’s a lot of turbulence due to the protruding cityscape interrupting the natural, even flow of the air. Kit aced the simulations, handling a bit of turbulence would be a breeze. No worries, right? “What the flight sims don’t tell you is that some instruments act a little differently in real life.”
The culprit was the vertical speed indicator (VSI) — an instrument designed to sense pressure differentials in the wind as you climb or descend, which helps the pilot maintain the right speed and altitude. “Unlike the simulation, the real gauge actually has a 3-5 second delay. So here I am, trying to maintain 300 feet a minute, but I’m just chasing the gauge,” Kit said while motioning his hand up and down like a yo-yo. “At this point, I was overwhelmed. There were buildings everywhere and I couldn’t stabilize. It was devastating.”
Kit overcame this early defeat and conquered the skies, but not before learning a few more lessons. “You shoot up like a rocket when you take your first solo flight ’cause there’s 170 less pounds of cargo on board,” he said with a chuckle, recalling it like a rite of passage. Or how the air is thicker when it’s cold, allowing the plane’s combustion engine to perform at its best. This makes flying in the northern prairies a lot smoother than hot and humid climates. “If it’s too hot, you risk not even being able to take off, or being unable to gain altitude, increasing your odds of crashing,” said Kit.
Pilots may prefer frigid winds in Manitoba, but many residents don’t share the sentiment. People say Winnipeg is one of Canada’s windiest cities. Though rooted more in legend than fact, this is thanks to our iconic yet deeply controversial intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street. The locally famous CBC news segment from 1979 discussing its street-level closure shows comical clips of city dwellers performing the “Portage and Main Technique: the quicker you can get across, the less chance you’ll freeze to death before you reach the other side.”
To the dismay of many motorists, the city now plans to modernize and revitalize this contentious slice of Winnipeg’s downtown. Their grand plans include an overhaul to the public transit system and — you guessed it — opening up Portage and Main after nearly 50 years.
Winnipeggers will have to wait and see if the wind is as unbearable as it was back in the 70s, but there might be modern solutions for this problem. The rise in popularity of airflow simulation tools and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) helps designers, architects, and engineers assess things like — bear with me here — pedestrian-level winds, structural wind loads, pollutant dispersion, snow and sand drifting, rain infiltration, and natural ventilation, to name a few. If that sounds like a lot, just know there’s people out there measuring all sorts of stuff, keeping our structures safe.
Although the city of Winnipeg has wind load requirements for downtown structures, there doesn’t seem to be a focused effort to mitigate wind effects at Portage and Main. Complex airflow simulators are costly and reserved for larger cities to help protect structures against hurricanes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be used to create innovative and visually appealing urban designs. A team of researchers in Kosice, Slovakia did just that.
By using state-of-the-art climate modelling, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and other machine learning tools, the team determined precise designs for sophisticated and fluid-like “urban roofs.” These roofs are meant to protect an outdoor amphitheatre from high winds and sun exposure. The researchers fed wind speeds and infrared levels through their models until a feasible and stylish design emerged to improve “pedestrian comfort” by over 30 per cent. This means people can sit comfortably without worrying about getting heat stroke or sudden gusts of intense wind.
Weather-driven design methods have the potential to greatly improve our lives, raising the importance of detailed case studies. Each new project builds on the last, allowing researchers, designers, and engineers to create universal frameworks tackling any number of wind or weather-related effects.
You don’t need expensive AI climate modelling to study the wind. We can learn a lot by listening to nature. Over the years, many people have become disconnected from the weather, only interacting with the wind in the moments between their destinations. The same cannot be said for the people of Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River), Nunavut.
In 2009, Inuit communities realized they could expand their knowledge by working with a group of meteorologists at the nearby weather station. In the spirit of collaboration, respect, and interconnectedness, an unconventional research project named Silalirijiit (“those who work with weather”) took shape.
To determine the many ways Inuit categorize wind and snow patterns, the researchers used workshops, interviews, mapping sessions, and focus groups comparing terminology. Additionally, five remote automated weather stations collect measurable data from locations chosen by community members. By comparing hard data against Inuit Traditional Knowledge, useful correlations emerged, benefitting both the communities and researchers.
This open-source approach to research — when everyone has an equal say — is known as “knowledge co-production.” The groups spent considerable time living together, sharing meals, scouting locations, commuting to weather stations, and even gathering in Colorado to visit the scientists’ homes. An excerpt from the study reads: “Unstructured time and interactions leave room to share stories, experience the same weather and snow and ice conditions, learn from one another, tease one another, and simply to become friends.”
What surprised researchers most was the depth of information Inuit consider when making weather-based decisions. Visibility, blowing snow, and water wave height are just as, or more, important than simply wind speeds when hunting parties decide to brave the weather. These physically based and complex factors led to a new term: human-relevant environment variables (H-REVs). Noticing these variables is second nature to Inuit — easily understood and implemented — thanks to generations of meticulous communal knowledge, helping them make informed, safe, productive and life-affirming decisions when travelling on land or sea.
This ongoing study shows the power of collaboration and respect. The insights and relationships gained by patiently nurturing a process are the ingredients to fostering mutual benefits. The Inuit communities around Kangiqtugaapik now have access to robust technologies with measurable weather data in near-real time; and the field of meteorology has new variables like H-REVs to quantify, helping us all understand weather more deeply and possibly leading to innovation in predictions.
Inuit apply their methods of respecting, observing, and understanding the wind to forming a bond with visitors to their land. In turn, researchers work with community members to gain their trust, respect, and wisdom. It’s a beautiful case study on the true value of knowledge co-production. By listening to the perspectives of people who read the wind like a language, we’ve learned so much about how humans understand, and are influenced by, the wind. Now we’ve learned from those who read the wind, what can we learn from those who ride the wind? (That’s my clever segue into some bird talk.)
The Centre for Biological Studies of Chizé in France studied an albatross breeding colony in the Crozet Islands near Antarctica for over twenty years. In 2012, they noticed the birds weighed about one extra kilogram while their population rose considerably. Scientists like ornithologist Henri Weimerskirch analyzed historical weather data and proved the albatross’ flight speed increased from coasting on a wind flow that shifted due to rising temperatures. “They expended less energy foraging since they found the same amount of food in less time,” said Weimerskirch in a documentary by German public broadcast service, Deutsche Welle. “Until we discovered this, the impact of climate change on animal behaviour was completely underestimated. It surprised us.”
Our friend Kit has the wind to thank for another bird win, though maybe not a win from the bird’s perspective. According to Kit: “Many birds evolved the instinct to fly fast and high to avoid hunters. You have to be strategic about it; you have to catch them where they land to feed early in the morning.” The seasons matter as well. If there’s a north wind in the fall, the birds will get a boost form the currents and avoid landing. “Then you’re like — well, guess I’m just bird watching today,” said Kit with a shrug. In that case, you’d wait for a south wind when the birds are keeping low and fighting to fly against the wind. There’s a lot to consider when hunting birds. The decoys, the camouflage, the weather, the timing — but especially conservation.
To conserve healthy bird populations, you can’t have too many hunters on the same land. One blustery fall day, Kit and his crew fell victim to seniority and hung back to let another group hunt their chosen field. The snowy weather made it hard for them to find an alternative spot. By around 10 a.m., well past peak hunting time, Kit decided to double back. To his surprise, the ducks were only coming to land now. Attributing their luck to the vicious weather, he and his friends quickly set up. The whiteout conditions helped keep Kit and his crew hidden from the birds’ keen eyes. “We ate like kings that winter. For once, the wind didn’t screw us!”
Unfortunately, the wind screwed Los Angeles for most of January 2025. The Santa Ana winds blew up to 160 km/h — that’s as fast as a hurricane — fanning the flames of two wildfires in the Californian hills. The winds were so intense that no water bombers could safely fly over the blaze, contributing to the loss of over 16,200 structures. This event is estimated to be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. According to Chief Anthony Marrone of the LA County Fire Department in an interview with Spectrum News, it takes an average of three fire trucks to quell the flames of one home. Without crucial air support, they didn’t stand a chance.
Santa Ana winds are dry and hot but start as a cold front blowing down from Nevada. They spill down the mountains of California, increasing in temperature and speed as they’re squeezed through mountain passes and canyons — like how a jet of water from a hose blocked by your thumb goes much faster and further. When it comes to blazes like these, wind is a far deadlier factor than drought. Wind violently whips the flames through the air instead of burning through vegetation on the ground.
Up here in Canada, high winds and extremely hot flames created fire tornadoes in Jasper, Alberta, destroying parts of the beloved tourist town in July of 2024. The event shook the nation, reminding many Canadians about the 2016 fires in Fort McMurray, Alberta, still one of our country’s most devastating natural disasters. Winds of up to 75 km/h played a major role in spreading this fire to an astonishing 580,000 hectares — that’s as big as 12.5 cities of Winnipeg. Leading up to the fires, several seasons of hot and dry weather from a brutal El Niño assured maximum destruction. El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña, are a puzzling phenomenon contributing to a lot of fear and climate confusion throughout history. We see evidence of them in ancient civilizations and written accounts as far back as the 15th century.
If you thought the explanation of how wind begins was confusing, buckle up — it gets weirder. One of the five strongest recorded El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events just ended in June 2024. It led to impressively high ocean temperatures, extreme rainfall in North America, and severe droughts in South America. El Niño and La Niña are like two sides of a slow-motion coin toss. It takes between two to seven years to completely flip over. Each side faces up for around nine to twelve months but can last several years.
To understand ENSO, we must first understand the Coriolis effect and trade winds. Trade winds were integral to historic naval exploration. They’re a lot like jet streams in the way their strong currents assist navigation, but trade winds are at ground level instead of way up in the troposphere, and jet streams flow from west to east while trade winds flow east to west — usually.
The Coriolis effect occurs between the Hadley and Ferrel cells and are essentially winds from either side of the equator meeting at different speeds. Wind speeds are determined by the Earth’s rotation and shape. Winds closer to the equator blow faster to keep up with the winds near the poles. The closer you get to the poles, the less distance it takes to cover one rotation of the planet, meaning the wind blows more slowly here.
So — wind at the equator gains momentum from the Earth’s rotation, creating a powerful force that influences the incoming wind to curve away from the equator, never fully able to meet. This is sort of like how the same sides of a magnet deflect each other, but imagine one of those magnets was moving super fast. That means storms in the Southern hemisphere spin clockwise but spin counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere. The Coriolis effect is why North Americans joke about Australians having reverse toilets, but the effect isn’t strong enough to do that.
Now back to the ENSO coin toss. When the coin is sideways, global weather is “normal” and as we expect it to be. This is known as an ENSO-neutral period. Trade winds blow from east to west, influencing surface seawater to flow in the same direction. This initiates a process called “upwelling.” It cycles surface water down, dragging bottom-dwelling, nutrient-rich colder water up to feed the ocean’s ecosystem, effectively regulating ocean temperatures.
Once the coin starts to flip towards the El Niño side, trade winds grow weaker (sometimes even switching directions entirely, which is rare and means we’re in for an intense ride), sea surface temperatures increase, and weather conditions dramatically change. Where there should be heavy rains, like the monsoon season in East Asia, there are droughts — but we see heat waves, heavy rains, and increased lightning activity in North America. Since the wind isn’t strong enough, ocean upwelling is slowed — this cooks sea surface temperatures, bleaches coral reefs and stops nutrients like phytoplankton from reaching the surface. That means less food for sea life, leaving less food for humans.
The other side of the coin, La Niña, sees faster than average trade winds and cooler sea surface temperatures, resulting in extreme versions of “neutral-like” weather. It can mean cold and wet winters for North America, a more active hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, and more rain for Australia and East Asia. Since ENSO periods are inconsistent and tough to predict even in modern times, it’s no wonder ancient civilizations feared them, attributing their effects to the wrath of Gods.
Predicting the weather is both science and art. For example, Farmer’s Almanacs are more art than science, a compilation of historical data reaching plausible conclusions. Not the most accurate measure of weather, but a quirky testament to peoples’ ability of drawing a story from data. On the other hand, meteorology is a science, though only an exact science up to a point. The very nature of weather and wind patterns is borderline random — chaotic, as Pat would say. Wind patterns are an example of a system adhering to the “chaos theory,” sometimes incorrectly referred to as “the butterfly effect.”
The chaos theory was first conceptualized in 1961 by meteorologist Edward Lorenz who noticed, by accident, how changing the starting conditions of his climate models yielded wildly different end results. Essentially, the theory dictates how systems with enough variables are impossible to predict after a certain point. Each variable the wind has a chance to interact with — like structures, mountains, water, heat from the sun, and human activity — produces a different outcome, and no two outcomes are ever the same. This is why weather forecasts are unreliable beyond seven days. Too many things can change between now and then. Maybe someday AI will be able to synthesize millions of data points to accurately predict the weather, but today is not that day.
Though chaos throws a wrench in our predictions, it isn’t inherently bad — as we see with the albatross and Kit’s lucky hunt. Despite the weather’s chaotic nature, new technology allows us to map wind’s trajectory on a global scale, offering valuable insights and even saving lives. The more we study the wind, the more pieces of the puzzle we leave for future generations. The more we understand and respect the wind, the more likely we are to find innovative ways to coexist with it, like implementing Inuit practices or developing clever urban roofs.
The wind is not our foe but is simply the result of a planet in motion. The wind is part of an endless cycle, weaving air across the globe. A reminder that we are all connected by currents capable of transporting the seeds of life or delivering swift destruction.
Our climate is changing and we’re still trying to understand what that means for humanity. If we take a step back to see the bigger picture, we might find surprising solutions.
When it comes to the wind, Kit said, “You can ride with the wind to your back and gain speed, or you can ride into the wind and grow stronger.” It’s all a matter of perspective.
