Bura (wind)

The Bora (Bulgarian and Russian: бора, Serbo-Croatian: bura, Greek: μπόρα, Slovene: burja, Italian, Polish and Turkish also Venetian: bòra) is a northern to north-eastern katabatic wind in the Adriatic sea. Similar nomenclature is used for north-eastern winds in other littoral areas of eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea basins.

The same root is found in the name of the Greek mythological figure of Boreas/Βορέας, the North Wind. Historical linguists speculate that the name may derive from a Proto-Indo-European root *gworh- meaning "mountain" and giving rise to Germanic burg and berg. A similar pattern is seen in the cognate name of the buran winds of central Asia and the name purga of their Siberian subtype.

In Modern Greek, the word "bora" (μπόρα, likely borrowed from Venetian bòra) describes an intense summer rain that lasts for a few minutes. In Croatian "burno" means "violently" and is commonly used to describe the weather.

The changeable Bora can often be felt all over Montenegrin Littoral, Dalmatia, Istria, the Slovenian Littoral, Trieste, and the rest of the Adriatic east coast. It blows in gusts. The Bora is most common during the winter. It blows hardest, as the meteorologist Baron Ferdinand von Wrangel explained it by extending Julius Hann's explanation of Alpine katabatic winds to the north Adriatic, when a polar high-pressure area sits over the snow-covered mountains of the interior plateau behind the Dinaric coastal mountain range and a calm low-pressure area lies further south over the warmer Adriatic. As the air grows even colder and thus denser at night, the Bora increases. Its initial temperature is so low that even with the warming occasioned by its descent it reaches the lowlands as a cold wind. The wind takes two different traditional names depending on associated meteorological conditions: the "light bora" (Italian: Bora chiara) is Bora in the presence of clear skies, whereas clouds gathering on the hilltops and moving towards the seaside with rain or snow characterize the "dark bora" (Bora scura).

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Wikipedia