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The wind belts girdling the planet are organised into three cells in each hemisphere—the Hadley cell, the Ferrel cell, and the polar cell. Those cells exist in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The vast bulk of the atmospheric motion occurs in the Hadley cell.
If the Earth were tidally locked to the Sun, solar heating would cause winds across the mid-latitudes to blow in a poleward direction, away from the subtropical ridge. . However, the Coriolis effect caused by the rotation of Earth tends to deflect poleward winds eastward from north (to the right) in the Northern Hemisphere and eastward from south (to the left) in the Southern Hemisph
Note, winds are named based on where they came from. The polar easterlies are one of the five primary wind zones, known as wind belts, that make up our atmosphere's circulatory system. This particular belt of wind begins at approximately 60 degrees north and south latitude and reaches to the poles.
The westerlies (blue) and trade winds (yellow and brown) Global surface wind vector flow lines colored by wind speed from June 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011. In meteorology, prevailing wind in a region of the Earth's surface is a surface wind that blows predominantly from a particular direction. The dominant winds are the trends in direction of ...
Wind is the natural movement of air or other gases relative to a planet's surface. Winds occur on a range of scales, from thunderstorm flows lasting tens of minutes, to local breezes generated by heating of land surfaces and lasting a few hours, to global winds resulting from the difference in absorption of solar energy between the climate ...
An increase of temperature with height is known as a temperature inversion. When it occurs within a trade wind regime, it is known as a trade wind inversion. [12] The surface air that flows from these subtropical high-pressure belts toward the Equator is deflected toward the west in both hemispheres by the Coriolis effect. [13]
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The only way to decrease the planetary vorticity is by moving the water parcel equatorward, so throughout the majority of subtropical gyres there is a weak equatorward flow. Harald Sverdrup quantified this phenomenon in his 1947 paper, "Wind Driven Currents in a Baroclinic Ocean", [6] in which the (depth-integrated) Sverdrup balance is defined ...