- published: 16 May 2011
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Bora (Bosnian: bura, Serbian Cyrillic: бура, Bulgarian: буран, Croatian: bura, Greek: βοράς, Italian: bora, Slovene: burja, Turkish: bora) is a northern to north-eastern katabatic wind in the Adriatic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, and Turkey.
The same root is found in the name of the Greek mythological figure of Boreas/Βορέας, the North Wind. Historical linguists speculate that the name may derive from a Proto-Indo-European root *gworh- meaning mountain.)
In Greek apart exists also the word "bora" (μπόρα) that describe an intense summer rain that lasts for a few minutes. In Albanian the word "bora" means snow.
The changeable Bora can often be felt all over Dalmatia, Istria, the Slovenian Littoral, Trieste, and the rest of the Adriatic east coast. It blows in gusts. The Bora is most common during the winter. It blows hardest, as the meteorologist Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel explained it by extending Julius Hann's explanation of Alpine katabatic winds to the north Adriatic, when a polar high-pressure area sits over the snow-covered mountains of the interior plateau behind the Dinaric coastal mountain range and a calm low-pressure area lies further south over the warmer Adriatic. As the air grows even colder and thus denser at night, the Bora increases. Its initial temperature is so low that even with the warming occasioned by its descent it reaches the lowlands as a cold wind. The wind takes two different traditional names depending on associated meteorological conditions: the "light bora" (Italian: Bora chiara) is Bora in the presence of clear skies, whereas clouds gathering on the hilltops and moving towards the seaside with rain or snow characterize the "dark bora" (Bora scura).
Bora may refer to:
Wind is the flow of gases on a large scale. On Earth, wind consists of the bulk movement of air. In outer space, solar wind is the movement of gases or charged particles from the sun through space, while planetary wind is the outgassing of light chemical elements from a planet's atmosphere into space. Winds are commonly classified by their spatial scale, their speed, the types of forces that cause them, the regions in which they occur, and their effect. The strongest observed winds on a planet in our solar system occur on Neptune and Saturn.
In meteorology, winds are often referred to according to their strength, and the direction from which the wind is blowing. Short bursts of high speed wind are termed gusts. Strong winds of intermediate duration (around one minute) are termed squalls. Long-duration winds have various names associated with their average strength, such as breeze, gale, storm, hurricane, and typhoon. Wind occurs on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate zones on Earth. The two main causes of large-scale atmospheric circulation are the differential heating between the equator and the poles, and the rotation of the planet (Coriolis effect). Within the tropics, thermal low circulations over terrain and high plateaus can drive monsoon circulations. In coastal areas the sea breeze/land breeze cycle can define local winds; in areas that have variable terrain, mountain and valley breezes can dominate local winds.