What makes wind howl

They are likely to believe that the wind has the potential to kill and destroy. As the wind passes through and around their branches and leaves, they cause those objects to move back and forth. This movement creates vibrations in the air, known as longitudinal pressure waves, which can travel to your ears as soft rustling or louder whooshing sounds. When the sound waves created by the tumbling air reach our ears, we hear whistling.

As the wind blows faster, the frequency of the sound gets higher. Wind really starts screaming through wires when its speed reaches at least 25 mph. Why does the wind whistle howl and moan? Pine branches. When the wind wants to whistle -- or howl -- it needs instruments to play. On a dark and stormy night, wind creates its spooky sound effects by rushing across obstacles in its way.

Depending on the rush of the wind, and the shape of what it's rushing over, wind may moan, scream, sing. Why is the wind so loud? The process of friction can release sound especially as wind speed becomes very high. The friction between air and objects can produce whistling sounds and swooshing sounds.

Higher wind blows trees stems and leaves around more causing them to bump into each other and to create sound. Is wind cold or warm? Wind helps remove the warm air immediately next to the skin and this causes a feeling of it being colder. The wind chill was developed because of the feeling that it gets colder when the wind is stronger due to a more rapid heat loss from the body.

How do we hear wind? When the air blows past your ear, some of that air gets trapped for a tiny fraction of a second inside your ear. It swirls in, swirls around, and swirls out. Just as with variously shaped musical instruments, differently shaped obstacles in a wind's path produce distinct sounds. Wind blowing through pine trees, their cylindrical needles setting air aswirl, has been compared to the sound of the sea. Houses also create wind music, especially the eerie kind. Winds whine at small cracks or holes in a building.

And a strong wind can howl as it blows down eaves and against sharp edges and corners. As air spills off the edges of a roof, some of the waves created reflect back into the streaming wind. This produces whirling vortexes of air, which strike and spin off the roof edge. The result is a complex, ever-shifting sound wave pattern, which we hear as howling.

Real Estate Technology Cars Columns. By Kathy Wollard. Print Share fb Share Tweet Email. Leafy trees "will absorb some of the vibrations in the air and dull the sound, but without leaves—like if it's the middle of the winter or the entire forest is dead—the howling will travel a lot farther," Green explains.

That's why a dead forest on a windy night sounds so much like the un dead. BY Kirstin Fawcett. Learn more by watching SciShow's video below. News physics video.