If air pressure is gravity pulling air down why does it also push up and to the sides?
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Each air molecule has energy, and that energy makes them bounce off each other. Air temperature is basically just a measure of how hard molecules are bouncing off the thermometer. They get that energy from the sun or other things that give off heat and hang onto it until they bounce off something that will absorb that energy. Gravity still definitely pulls the molecules down but they are way too bouncy to just get crushed. But it is also why the air is way thicker at sea level than on the top of a mountain
Imagine diving into a pool: you’ve got plenty of water above you, but you don’t feel like you’re carrying all the water on top of you because you’re on top of more water yourself. Air pressure acts in all directions because, as a fluid, it tends to spread out in all directions to fill the shape of its container. In the case of the atmosphere, the container is the Earth’s surface. Just like it water, anything above the surface is going to be as pressed upon by the surrounding fluid from below as from above or any other direction.
imagine a bunch of marbles in a cylinder… the walls of the cylinder keep them in place. Remove the cylinder and the marbles push out to the sides and it collapses.
Basically stuff is pushing down from above, so the marbles want to move to the sides to escape. But all the other marbles are trying to escape to the sides as well, this is pressure.
The molecules of a gas are moving around in random directions all the time. How fast they’re moving is related to their temperature.
Whenever a gas molecule traveling in your direction hits you and bounces off you, the gas is exerting a pressure on you. And because there are molecules moving in all directions all the time, it’s always exerting pressure in all directions.
It doesn’t, it simply moves in the direction of any lower pressure areas. If that happens to be in the direction our senses perceive as “up”, that’s the direction in which it will “push”.
There are far more complexities at work here but this *is* ELI5.
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