What we do know is that because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can't abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air's way of trying to keep things in balance. Air always flows from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure (as you would expect; think of anything with air under pressure—a balloon or an air tank—and think how insistently that pressured air wants to get someplace else), and the greater the discrepancy in pressures the faster the wind blows.
我们知道的是，太阳的热量分布不匀，形成了本行星上的不同气压。空气无法容忍这种状态，于是就横冲直撞，想要实现处处平衡。风就是空气想要实现这样的平衡的一种办法。空气总是从高压地带向低压地带流动（你会料到这一点。想像一个含有压缩空气的任何东西——一个气球，或一个气罐，或一架没有窗户的飞机，想像一下压缩空气如何老是想去别处）。压力相差越大，风的速度就越快。

Incidentally, wind speeds, like most things that accumulate, grow exponentially, so a wind blowing at two hundred miles an hour is not simply ten times stronger than a wind blowing at twenty miles an hour, but a hundred times stronger—and hence that much more destructive. Introduce several million tons of air to this accelerator effect and the result can be exceedingly energetic. A tropical hurricane can release in twenty-four hours as much energy as a rich, medium-sized nation like Britain or France uses in a year.
顺便说一句，风速像大多数累积的东西一样，是以指数来增长的，因此以每小时300公里的速度刮的风，不是比以每小时30公里的速度刮的风强10倍，而是强100倍——因此它的破坏性也要大得多。要是将几百万吨空气加速到这种程度，就能产生极其巨大的能量。一场热带飓风在24小时里所释放的能量。相当于像英国或法国这样一个富裕的中等国家一年所使用的能量。
The impulse of the atmosphere to seek equilibrium was first suspected by Edmond Halley—the man who was everywhere—and elaborated upon in the eighteenth century by his fellow Briton George Hadley, who saw that rising and falling columns of air tended to produce "cells" (known ever since as "Hadley cells").
大气寻求平衡的干劲，是由埃德蒙·哈雷首先发现的——他是个无处不在的人物，并由他的英国同胞乔治·哈德利在18世纪加以阐述。哈德利注意到，上升和下降的气柱往往会产生“环流”（自那以后一直被称之为哈德利环流）。