Summer Wind 2014

South End, Tybee Island, Georgia

For the past week we have watched wave after wave of clouds, showers, and some strong storms sweep across our patch of Piedmont east of Atlanta. It is a sure sign that the trade winds have resumed for another year. 

In coastal Georgia, the trades usually creep in softly around the middle of May. They bring in the high cirrus and horsetails as well as the puffy fair-weather cumulus clouds that race over the beach. The clouds sweep inland twenty miles or so where they meet the uplifts of diurnal heating enhanced by the incentives of an onshore flow. Often, the result is a brisk and exciting line of thunderstorms sometimes extending from the city-state of Charleston to the Players Club fairways at Ponte Vedra Beach. In Savannah, the 3:00 pm showers are so predictable you can almost set a watch by them. When residents advised me an umbrella was a summer essential they weren't fooling. The city's collapsing thunderstorms produced some of the heaviest perpendicular rainfall I've witnessed.  

For eleven years I worked at the mouth of the Savannah River and watched the light show over Savannah arcing north and east toward Hilton Head Island.  Occasionally storms moved to my location when the land breezes swept in early and pushed the activity to the southeast. Such a magnificent show.  Warm evenings were soon replaced in the early morning hours with a quiet southeasterly breeze embracing the island in salt-saturated humidity and a haze that turned golden with a full sunrise. The Boat-tailed Grackles skirmishing in the oleanders nearby served as a natural alarm clock during the eight years we lived on Tybee Island. I do miss the birds, but not their alarm clock role.

The trade wind days last into September to be replaced by weeks of spectacular warm, dry, cloudless days, cool nights and warm water lingering into November. Of course, the occasional tropical storm can interrupt the coastal idyll that is the norm on the sea islands. It is to be expected and respected by those who share the fragile boundary of life at the ocean's edge. In Atlanta we'll sometimes enjoy the remnant sea breezes that survive the 200 mile journey from the Atlantic. It is a welcome reminder of the joy of coastal living.