The wind brings with it the character of the land, or water, it passes over. It adopts signature scents and temperatures and if the land of an area is known well enough, it is often possible to deduce the direction that a wind is coming from by analysing its character. Gustave Flaubert does a humorous and divine job of exposing this concept through the mouth of the young chemist in his novel, Madame Bovary:
‘And, as it happens, we are sheltered from the north wind by the Forest of Argueil on one side, from the west wind by the Cote Saint-Jean on the other; and this heat, you see, which on account of the water vapour given off by the river and the considerable presence of cattle in the meadows, which exhale, as you know, a good deal of ammonia, that’s to say nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, just…
On holiday I did try very hard not to think too much about navigation, but wherever I am I cannot resist checking that the sun is behaving itself appropriately considering my latitude and the season. At 7 degrees north, Phuket is in the northern hemisphere and the tropics and because the sun is now well south of the equator the short midday shadow is cast towards the north. Nearer June this same pencil would cast a shadow in the opposite direction at midday, to the south.