You say diablo, I say sirocco

A hot wind by any other name is just as enervating. The people of Los Angeles and San Francisco put up with occasional Santa Ana and diablo winds, respectively, that funnel down the canyons flanking these cities. Southern Europeans are familiar with a torrid desert wind that blows in from the Sahara or Middle East; it's called the leveche in Spain the sirocco in Italy, and the levanto in the Canary Islands. Since this wind arrives at low levels, it's not downsloping – just furiously hot. When desert air from interior Australia blows into the southeast coast, Sydneysiders call it a brickfielder, after the dusty industrial areas scoured by the same wind in an earlier era. Wintry North American air masses sometimes careen into and over the mountains of Central America; if they reach the Pacific coast, they produce a papagayo in Nicaragua and Guatemala and, to the north-west, a Tehuantepecer in the Gulf of Tehuantepec. Hurricanes often skirt the same Pacific coast in the summer, although they seldom make landfall. The southerly wind they pro- duce has been called a cordonazo, or the lash of St Francis (after the Feast of St Francis, which occurs on October 4, close to the peak of hurricane season).