Berg wind
![The Southern African Central Plateau edged by the Great Escarpment.](/Images/godic/202501/05/Southern_African_Central_Plateau5634.jpg")
![The weather pattern commonly associated with a berg wind and accompanying coastal low along the coast of South Africa. The light blue lines indicate surface wind directions. The](/Images/godic/202501/05/Coastal_low5634.jpg")
![Berg wind blowing desert sand off the Namibian coast. These strong, hot winds are lofting plumes of dust directly out into the Atlantic Ocean in this panoramic image. The southern African equivalent of Santa Ana winds in California, berg winds blow on a few occasions in fall and winter, off all coasts of southern Africa. Other images from the space station have captured these dust plumes. Namibia's great Sand Sea appears here as a reddish zone along part of the coast (centre). The Sand Sea is more than 350 kilometers long, giving a sense of the length of the visible dust plumes. A light-toned sediment plume enters the sea at the mouth of the Orange River (lower left), southern Africa's largest river.](/Images/godic/202501/05/ISS-40_Namib_Desert_coast_and_dust_plumes5634.jpg")
Berg wind (from Afrikaans berg "mountain" + wind "wind", i.e. a mountain wind) is the South African name for a katabatic wind: a hot dry wind blowing down the Great Escarpment from the high central plateau to the coast.
When the air that has been heated on the extensive central plateau flows down the escarpment to the coast it undergoes further warming by adiabatic processes. This accounts for the hot and dry properties of these off-shore winds, wherever they occur along South Africa's coastline.