WordNet
n. a warm dry wind blowing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies [syn: chinook, snow eater]
Wikipedia
Chinook winds , or simply chinooks, are foehn winds in the interior West of North America, where the Canadian Prairies and Great Plains meet various mountain ranges, although the original usage is in reference to wet, warm coastal winds in the Pacific Northwest.
Chinook is claimed by popular folk-etymology to mean "ice-eater", but it is really the name of the people in the region where the usage was first derived. The reference to a wind or weather system, simply "a Chinook", originally meant a warming wind from the ocean into the interior regions of the Pacific Northwest of the USA (the Chinook people lived near the ocean, along the lower Columbia River). A strong Chinook can make snow one foot deep almost vanish in one day. The snow partly melts and partly evaporates in the dry wind. Chinook winds have been observed to raise winter temperature, often from below -20 °C (-4 °F) to as high as 10-20 °C (50-68 °F) for a few hours or days, then temperatures plummet to their base levels. The greatest recorded temperature change in 24 hours was caused by Chinook winds on January 15, 1972, in Loma, Montana; the temperature rose from -48 to 9 °C (-54 to 48 °F).
Usage examples of "chinook wind".
To Pitt, seated inside the bow observation cabin, it was an eerie sight to watch the great hull sweep over the submarine like a Chinook wind out of the north, a vast mechanical monster with no mind of its own.
He'd been snowed in at a line camp one winter for a month and a half, waiting for a warm chinook wind.
It did not, as it all too frequently does, linger in sodden, stubborn, dirty-white patches in yards and on sidewalks, but rather was cut away in a single night by a warm, wet Chinook wind.