Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 12, 1993 TAG: 9303120080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FEEL WEIRD? ELEMENTARY, IT'S THE WIND
SO HERE IT COMES, time for the annual March madness. Basketball tournament time? No, the wind. It'll drive you nuts. Really. It's Foehn Sickness, the full moon of weather.
Feeling tense? Irritable? Stressed out?
The answer is blowing in the wind.
And here you thought it was your boss, or your spouse squeezing the toothpaste from the middle of the tube, or your 1040s, or that new Madonna video, or the way your neighbor's cat regularly excavates the flower bed on a scale that would rival the new Roanoke County reservoir.
Instead, it might be the wind that's shaking your nerves and rattling your brain, and eventually we'll tell you why.
But first, in the interest of science, a simple question: Why is March so windy?
You know, that whole lion and lamb business. Metaphorically speaking, March seems to be the slaughterhouse of seasons. And windy, too. How come?
For the answer, we turn to our friends at the state climatologist's office at the University of Virginia, where your tax dollars (111,000 of them in the coming year) are at work providing citizens with every conceivable form of weather trivia.
State climatologist Pat Michaels could spend an afternoon talking about Hedley cells, the Coriolis force and the Earth's angular rotation. Fortunately, he'll spare us all those details and boil today's weather lesson down to this:
The equator's hot. The north pole is cold. The equator has low air pressure (hey, kick back and relax, man). The north pole has high pressure (Santa's got a deadline to meet; don't hassle him).
Mother Nature has to balance things out somewhere over North America. Or, as Michaels puts it, "wind blows to compensate for the fact that there's more air in one place and less in another, and nature abhors a vacuum." The result, is whoosh. Wind.
The Earth's day-to-day mechanism for working out the messy climatological details is the jet stream. In the winter, the jet stream rides somewhere down in the Caribbean. As the northern hemisphere heats up with spring, the jet stream migrates - "like the birds," Michaels says - to Canada or thereabouts.
March just happens to be when the jet stream is bumping overhead for most of us in North America. Ergo, it's windier.
The same thing happens in November, but we're too busy with elections and Thanksgiving and football games and Christmas shopping and deer season to notice. So it's March that gets our attention.
Now, we should point out here that not all winds are created equal. There are wet winds and dry winds and hot winds and cold winds and all manner of combinations thereof. Climatologists and various tribal shamans around the world have taken the time to name their winds. They've given them wonderful names, too.
There's the Zonda that blows down off the Andes in Argentina. There's the Etesian in the Mediterranean, the Santa Ana in California, the Chinook in the Rockies, the Bora in the Adriatic, the Khamsin in North Africa, not to mention the Ghibili, the Scirocco and the LaVeche. (If you noticed, at least three of the winds are named after types of foreign cars, which may give you some idea of what climatologists are driving these days).
And then there's the notorious Foehn in the Alps, which has lent its name to the worldwide phenomenon known as Foehn Sickness - which looks like it ought to be pronounced "phone" but is really a German word unpronounceable by most Virginians and sounds like it has an "r" in there somewhere.
According to "Understanding Our Atmospheric Environment," high winds can bring on "physical discomfort and stress that may exacerbate already-existing ailments." That's Foehn Sickness.
You'd think in these windy days of March that Foehn Sickness would abound, that workers would call in absent, students would stay home in droves, and life would just generally grind to a halt. So we set out in search of this mysterious malady. At first, we thought we were just spitting in the wind, so to speak.
"The only thing I've noticed weird is my hair gets messed up," laments Penny Lloyd, an office worker-type in the breezy canyons of downtown Roanoke. "The only thing I've heard is before a storm the air is ionized and if you breathe deep, you'll get all weird."
Actually, she may be onto something there. The Israelis have been studying the hot, dry desert winds of North Africa, trying to prove there's a connection between the winds and ions and neuro-transmitters in the brain. In short, does the wind make people hard to get along with? (Gee, think of the geopolitical implications. Maybe if the Arabs and Israelis lived in a calmer climate, say, Aruba, they'd get along just fine.)
In any event, we moved on to the Poff Federal Building, where a wind phenomenon called the Venturi Effect - it's a tall building thingamabob - regularly blows important papers out of the hands of government workers as soon as they turn the corner for the parking lot. "Is that what's wrong with me today?" asked one beleaguered receptionist. "I've had a real bad day."
The more we probed, the more evidence of Foehn Sickness we uncovered.
At Eagle Rock Elementary School, where the wind howls down the James River toward the gap between Switzer Mountain and Rat Hole Mountain, Principal Lois Faddis hasn't noticed any unusual behavior at school. But at home, her husband is a different story. "The wind freaks him out," she says. "If the wind is blowing, he can't sleep. He's very restless."
At Virginia Tech, school spokesman Dave Nutter is willing to spew out all kinds of propaganda about his institution, until it comes to the wind, and then it's the unvarnished truth.
"Blacksburg is just the wind capital of the world," he declares. "I've never lived in a windier place. It gets really depressing sometimes. I understand it's because we're on a plateau and the wind comes whipping over us. You have to bear into it sometimes. It's a real pain."
Finally, we happened upon Sue Basham, who recently retired from the Raleigh Court Presbyterian Pre-School in Roanoke. She's a confirmed believer in Foehn Sickness, although she didn't know that's what it was called.
"On windy days, the children get very hyper," she says. "It definitely makes a big difference. We used to try to play soothing music so there'd be a counteracting force. If you can play quiet games and quiet music, it seems to work with preschoolers."
But what about with adults?
For advice, we turned to Ronald Myers, a psychiatrist at St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford.
Myers once served as a U.S. Army psychiatrist in Germany, and knew all about not only Foehn Sickness, but the evil Foehn winds themselves. "It's a dry, hot wind that blows down from the Alps," he says. "There are a lot of myths attached to it, that the Foehn makes people crazy, that the Foehn makes people edgy and jumpy and judges would take that into account if the Foehn was blowing when a crime was committed."
Myers also saw the recent episode of "Northern Exposure," the one where the Cohos wind blew through Alaska and made the good folks of Cicely do things they ordinarily wouldn't have done.
"That's why Joel and what's-her-name ended up making love," Myers says.
Maggie!, Dr. Myers. Her name is Maggie! Gee, if you're gonna cite television shows in support of science, at least get the names right. And remember, the sheep wandered into the middle of town, and the shepherd wanted to abandon his calling and the invincible Maurice almost fell off the rooftop and went splat like a coconut?!?
Yeah, Myers remembers now.
Unfortunately, he says, it's not true. Not the TV series and not the Foehn Sickness. "I don't know of anything in the psychiatric literature," he says.
But he says there is something called Seasonal Affective Disorder, a condition in which some folks have a biochemical reaction to the short days of winter and become depressed.
But that's a story for another day, another season. Besides, "Northern Exposure" has already done an episode on that, too.