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Consider that you are living at the bottom of a huge, world-wide ocean.
If there were no sun and the world maintained a constant temperature, that ocean would be a calm, tepid mass, subject only to local eddies, produced by any local motion or hot spots. Not a very meteorologically interesting place, to be sure, but a nice picture to use to describe what we want to illustrate.
There are two primary influences upon the atmosphere that we can consider, the heating produced by the sun, basically bringing this tepid teapot to a boil, and the forces of gravity from the sun and moon, which produce large "tides" in the atmosphere. This last week, both the sun and moon have shown up on the same side of the rotating earth, causing some pretty amazing tides in the atmosphere and oceans, as well as tides in the actual crust of the earth.
There is an astonishingly complex interplay between these forces, affected by mountain ranges, prairies, the weight, or mass, of the local atmosphere (caused primarily by its moisture load) and other factors. There is a twice daily change in winds, occurring around sunset and sunrise, although quite often those changes are masked by even more severe changes produced by local weather patterns and the heating caused by the sun.
If you've ever flown around much in a small plane, you will have noticed another phenomenon. The winds on the ground can be nearly perfectly calm, but go up a couple hundred feet and the breeze is stiff. This is especially noticeable around dawn. I used to like to go flying while it was still dark and go up a few thousand feet to watch the sun rise, then come back to a hot cup of coffee and watch it rise again.
Changes in the atmosphere can bring these stiff breezes down to the ground and keep them there, causing all sorts of effects. Out here on the prairie-I live in Illinois-the winds can be pretty spectacular, with straight line winds reaching speeds and destructive capacity that people in more rolling areas can't really imagine.
In all this stuff there may be an explanation for your local conditions, but, as I am quite a distance from you-south central Illinois-I can't evaluate accurately what's going on there.
Have some fun and do some of your own measuring, along with looking at the weather maps in your area, and you are quite likely to figure out what is causing the conditions you describe.
There are some other neat conditions, such as the rising of the air, from heating, at the equator. That air is moving along with the spinning earth at about a thousand miles an hour. It must then move to the north and south and descend toward the ground in an area that is moving considerably less than that speed, causing huge winds that are modified or even stopped by the local "sloshing" of the air-ocean and its tides, making the picture even more complicated, but that's a discussion for another time.
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