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Thermal wind
Wind driven by uneven solar heating on a daily cycle — sea breezes, valley breezes, anabatic upslope flow all belong to this family.
Also known as: thermal, thermal flow
Thermal wind is the umbrella term for any wind driven by uneven heating of the ground (land/sea, valley/ridge, snow/dirt). The sun warms surfaces at different rates, the warmer air rises, cooler air rushes in to replace it. Everything runs on a daily cycle — wind tracks the sun and dies with it.
The thermal family:
- Sea breeze — onshore daytime flow, the most rideable thermal
- Land breeze — its weaker nighttime offshore opposite
- Anabatic wind — upslope flow on sun-warmed mountainsides
- Valley wind / mountain wind — daily reversal along an aligned valley (Garda’s Pelèr / Ora is the textbook pair)
- Lake breeze — small-scale sea-breeze cousin on large lakes (Garda, Erie, Balaton)
Two things every rider should know:
- Thermal winds need a weak gradient. Strong synoptic flow overrides them.
- Coarse models (GFS) flatten thermals. Mesoscale models (ICON, AROME) resolve them. If your forecast app says 8 kt on a sunny coastal afternoon and the high-res one says 22, the high-res one is usually right.
Deeper dive in Sea Breeze 101 and the wider taxonomy in Types of Wind.
Related terms
- Sea breeze A daytime onshore wind driven by uneven heating of land and water — the engine of most summer coastal sessions.
- Land breeze A nighttime offshore wind driven by the reverse of the sea-breeze cycle — cooler over land, warmer over water.
- Gradient wind The large-scale wind driven by pressure differences between weather systems — the synoptic background flow that everything else rides on top of.
- Föhn wind A warm, dry, often gusty downslope wind on the lee side of a mountain range — Föhn in the Alps, Chinook in the Rockies, Halny in the Tatras.