(ORDO NEWS) — Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons regularly cause storms in the tropical regions of our planet, raising hell wherever they appear.
However, it is curious that they very rarely approach the equator, and, even more strangely, they never cross it.
Hurricanes , cyclones, and typhoons are the same phenomenon, but their names differ depending on where on the planet they occur: hurricanes in the North Atlantic and the Pacific Northeast, typhoons in the Western Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian ocean.
To simplify understanding, we will simply refer to all these tropical storms as “hurricanes”.
Hurricanes are like a huge spinning turbine powered by warm, moist air. They tend to form in tropical seas where the water temperature is above 26°C.
The air above the sea surface is heated by warm waters, causing it to rise and cool, forming clouds and thunderstorms.
The rise of air also causes a low pressure pocket to form at the bottom, which causes an influx of air.
These conditions can cause the storm to go into a tailspin. Eventually, the gathering clouds overhead release rain and dump heat to the surface, further fueling the storm below.
The direction of the wind and the rotation of a hurricane are determined by the Coriolis force, the inertial rotation of an object caused by the rotation of the Earth.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth’s rotation causes air to be pulled counterclockwise, resulting in hurricanes that spin counterclockwise.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite happens, and they rotate clockwise.
Although they often occur in mild tropical waters, hurricanes rarely form within 300 kilometers of the equator.
In 2003, Typhoon Wamei was seen orbiting just 150 kilometers north of the equator, but that was the real exception, happening less than once a century.
They do not occur near the equator because there is no Coriolis effect, which means that patches of stormy weather do not tend to “unwind” into a hurricane.
Similarly, we don’t see hurricanes crossing the equator, as that would effectively mean they would have to stop spinning, change direction, and spin in the other direction.
Hypothetically, a hurricane could overcome this. Meteorology professor Gary Barnes, of the University of Hawaii, explained that it is theoretically possible for a “well-developed storm” to be strong enough to continue its momentum over the relatively weak Coriolis force and make its way to the equator.
However, Professor Barnes and other researchers noted that they had never encountered this in reality.
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