Abstract
The sea breeze is an atmospheric phenomenon that can appear in many coastal areas of the world. On the island of Mallorca, in the center of the Western Mediterranean, the coastal breezes present prototypical characteristics. They are so consistent that their effectiveness allows for easy scientific verification. The sea breeze system is defined in Mallorca by its multi-directional spatial behavior and its unifying nature. As a result of the physical insularity of the land, coastal breezes have multiple orientations and act in opposite directions. This means that they can operate simultaneously on different coasts, and penetrate inland areas, where they typically converge, eliminating slope winds and forming convective chimneys, creating storms. In this article, we characterize and label the coastal breezes of Mallorca, and we verify their influence in the places where this phenomenon appears. A broader understanding of them reveals their remarkable influence on all spheres of life and human settlement: climatic, ecological, biological and geomorphological, but also cultural, territorial, economic and social.
Highlights
One of the most obvious atmospheric demonstrations of the relationship between the maritime and terrestrial domains is the sea breeze, a phenomenon defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 1992) [1] as “wind in coastal regions, blowing by day from a large water surface towards the land as a result of diurnal heating of the land surface”
Considering that the impacts of sea breezes cover a wide spectrum of possibilities, we describe them for Mallorca because on this island these impacts are presented in an exemplary way
The characterization and modeling of the dynamics of the breeze system is qualitative and is based on the conclusions derived from a campaign of surveys to farmers and fishermen of the island [19], who gave key oral information to understand the general scheme of the spatial behavior of the diurnal breeze
Summary
One of the most obvious atmospheric demonstrations of the relationship between the maritime and terrestrial domains is the sea breeze, a phenomenon defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 1992) [1] as “wind in coastal regions, blowing by day from a large water surface towards the land as a result of diurnal heating of the land surface”. Its effects on the climate and local meteorology of many regions of the Earth have been ratified by the scientific literature, in which we find works on the impact of the sea breeze on summer air temperature [4,5,6,7], air quality in urban coastal environments [8], or on convective activity [9,10]. 12–25) described how “around ten o’clock in the morning, every day, or almost every day, a sea breeze rises, named ‘embat’, very pleasant, which softens the heat; it lasts all day and dies out at sunset These winds are not constant and on many days there is dead calm. The scientific interest in this phenomenon in Mallorca has not diminished, and international studies are still underway to study the island’s sea breeze
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