Any climate depends on, firstly, local factors and, secondly, advection. The former include radiation, rainfall and evaporation, and the latter the heat and moisture brought by oceans and winds. We have dealt with each of these by now, except the winds, which are the topic of this fourth part of the book.
We can distinguish various scales of air movement, just as distinctions were made in Table 1.1 between different scales of climate. There are 'local winds' (which will be discussed in Chapter 14), within the context of a larger pattern of winds on the scale of an area like Australia or New Zealand (Chapter 13), and they in turn form part of the long-term average pattern of global winds, the 'general circulation'. This last is the background to weather, the explanation of global patterns of rainfall, a means of sharing heat between the equator and the poles, and the arena of climate change. It is the subject of the present chapter.
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