this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Probably Coriolis effect? I’m not a professional meteorologist but I am an amateur meteorologist. I live in New Orleans and hurricanes follow somewhat predictable patterns. (Maybe not always where you can pinpoint exactly where they’re going but they tend to turn north in the northern hemisphere and south in the southern hemisphere.)
You can also look at some of the coastlines and see the millions of years of erosion from the same patterns once the continents moved more into what we have now.
The coriolis effect is a fictitious force, it's just an artifact of not doing measurements in an inertial reference frame.
Edit: If I were to attribute it to anything, I'd attribute it to the actual rotation of the earth.
As the highs lows are part of the earth's atmosphere and thus trapped in a non-inertial frame of reference, they indeed experience the fictitious forces, such as the Coriolis and the centrifugal force.
The coriolis effect is not an actual force, that's all I'm saying.
Which is why we call it the Coriolis effect rather than the Coriolis force