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Air within high-pressure systems rotates in a direction such that the Coriolis force is directed radially inwards, and nearly balanced by the outwardly radial pressure gradient. As a result, air travels clockwise around high pressure in the Northern Hemisphere and anticlockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
The rotation of the earth results in a "force" being felt by the water moving from the high to the low, known as Coriolis force. The Coriolis force acts at right angles to the flow, and when it balances the pressure gradient force, the resulting flow is known as geostrophic. As stated above, the direction of flow is with the high pressure to ...
The Coriolis force deflects the air movement to the right in the northern hemisphere and the left in the southern one, which makes the winds parallel to the isobars on an elevation in pressure card. [1] It is also referred as the geostrophic wind. [2] Pressure differences depend, in turn, on the average temperature in the air column.
In the study of Earth's atmosphere, polar easterlies are the dry, cold prevailing winds that blow around the high-pressure areas of the polar highs at the North and South Poles. [1] Cold air subsides at the poles creating high pressure zones, forcing an equatorward outflow of air; that outflow is then deflected westward by the Coriolis effect.
The effect of friction, between the air and the land, breaks the geostrophic balance. Friction slows the flow, lessening the effect of the Coriolis force. As a result, the pressure gradient force has a greater effect and the air still moves from high pressure to low pressure, though with great deflection.
Those cells exist in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The vast bulk of the atmospheric motion occurs in the Hadley cell. The high pressure systems acting on the Earth's surface are balanced by the low pressure systems elsewhere. As a result, there is a balance of forces acting on the Earth's surface.
The geostrophic wind component is the result of the balance between Coriolis force and pressure gradient force. It flows parallel to isobars and approximates the flow above the atmospheric boundary layer in the midlatitudes. [4]
In physics, the Coriolis force is an inertial (or fictitious) force that acts on objects in motion within a frame of reference that rotates with respect to an inertial frame. In a reference frame with clockwise rotation, the force acts to the left of the motion of the object. In one with anticlockwise (or counterclockwise) rotation, the force ...