ELI5 Coriolis Effect. I don’t understand what it does
In: Physics
Let’s say you’re driving a hovercraft on a giant smooth sphere. You rev your engine at the equator and start to drive that sucker to the North Pole of this giant sphere. But the sphere is rotating as you travel. There’s the perfect lack of contact between your hovercraft and the sphere that as you travel north, you also move to the left just a little bit. If you were to plot your path it wouldn’t be a straight line like longitude. Your path would appear curve on a map because the sphere was moving underneath your hovercraft. Your end point would be on a different longitudinal line than when you started. In terms of weather the Coriolis Effect contributes to the direction of overall wind patterns on Earth. For example, in my region of the US weather systems pretty much always come from the west, even though that system may have started much farther north.
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