Sea Breeze or Gulf Breeze

[tireman4]

Tim Heller, Meteorologist at Channel 13 is asking this question..

We use the correct meteorological term "sea breeze" to define a moist air mass moving in from the Gulf of Mexico. (That's what is creating today's rain along the coast.)But a viewer suggested we call it a "gulf breeze." While that's not the correct term it does accurately describes the meteorological feature. Makes sense to me. What do you think? What should we call it? Sea Breeze or Gulf Breeze?


What say you? I still say Sea Breeze. It is a shoreline phenomenia, right? Wxman 57, Srain, Andrew?

[srainhoutx]

Tim Heller, Meteorologist at Channel 13 is asking this question..

We use the correct meteorological term "sea breeze" to define a moist air mass moving in from the Gulf of Mexico. (That's what is creating today's rain along the coast.)But a viewer suggested we call it a "gulf breeze." While that's not the correct term it does accurately describes the meteorological feature. Makes sense to me. What do you think? What should we call it? Sea Breeze or Gulf Breeze?


What say you? I still say Sea Breeze. It is a shoreline phenomenia, right? Wxman 57, Srain, Andrew?

Sea Breeze is what I've always heard as the winds turn from the S and increase as we often see on radar imagery. While we do live along the Gulf Coast, it is the same phenomenon experienced along the Atlantic Coastal Regions, IMO.

[jeff]

Seabreeze, lakebreeze, baybreeze, Gulfbreeze are all the same concept driven by inland heating...it is a circulation created by the differences in pressures resulting from the heating of the land on warm days compared to the "cooler" water temperatures...the circulation itself is frequent (sometimes even on breezy days and usually reverses at night...the landbreeze during the dead of summer. The term used in NWS discussions is seabreeze although I have been baybreeze a few times from HGX refering to the outward moving breeze that spreads inland from Galveston Bay. While many use the concept of the seabreeze as a boundary that creates thunderstorms...that was not the intended use of the term.

The seabreeze circulation is thought to play a significant role in some of Houston's air pollution concerns in weak flow regimes as the pattern repeats nearly every day in the summer and with strong high pressure aloft as can be common the air is circulated offshore at night only to be brought back inland the following day..building poor air quality. Convection along the boundary helps to diffuse the pollution in addition to giving strong vertical elements that can purge the low levels.

I will stick with seabreeze as that is the most common term.

[jeff]

indeed it is...not to mention that kink usually happens over the heated concrete and steel of the petro plants along the ship channel and west side of the bay...locally possibly a highly unstable air mass after a few hours of strong morning heating in a tropical envirno. Another place where this happens is over Texas City where the bay and west bay breezes meet up from time to time.