They are tropical storms so why can’t they traverse the entirety of the tropics?
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Due to the Coriolis effect being limited and is zero at the equator. They don’t form too close to the equator either. Because the Coriolis force is too weak there, the air will simply go from high to low pressure without rotating. No rotation, no storm.
Because the Earth is rotating. This causes things that move north or south to change speeds relative to the ground. When you move towards the equator, you appear to slow down, and when you move away from the equator, you appear to speed up. This is called the Coriolis effect. And it also causes tropical storms to rotate the way they do.
The storms aren’t getting pushed by anything, so that slowing they get when they move towards the equator is enough to completely stop any net north/south movement.
Due to the Coriolis effect being limited and is zero at the equator. They don’t form too close to the equator either. Because the Coriolis force is too weak there, the air will simply go from high to low pressure without rotating. No rotation, no storm.
Because the Earth is rotating. This causes things that move north or south to change speeds relative to the ground. When you move towards the equator, you appear to slow down, and when you move away from the equator, you appear to speed up. This is called the Coriolis effect. And it also causes tropical storms to rotate the way they do.
The storms aren’t getting pushed by anything, so that slowing they get when they move towards the equator is enough to completely stop any net north/south movement.
When you stand on the north pole how fast are you moving relative to the earth’s core?
Zero, you just spin around in place once every 24 hours.
When you stand on the equator how fast are you moving?
1000mph, you have to circumnavigate the earth in a day.
This difference doesn’t matter much when you throw a baseball, but it absolutely matters when you’re a storm the size of a country. This disparity in relative speed rotates the storm since the equatorial side is moving faster than the polar side, and it provides the swirling structure of the hurricane.
But here’s the problem – storms in the north spin counter-clockwise and storms in the south spin clockwise.
That means to cross the equator you have to stop and reverse direction. That’s not happening, and hurricanes never track near the equator because neither the storm itself nor the prevailing winds that push it around can approach this reversal boundary.
Because of the coriolis effect. Storms are driven by air rushing to fill low pressure regions. In the northern hemisphere, when something moves north, it has a bit of extra velocity to the east because the Earth spins faster at the equator than at the poles. So if you blow some air north, it will curve to the east. Similarly, if you blow air south, it curves to the west. Now when you have a low pressure region, the air tries to fill it back in, but ends up circling around in a clockwise direction and the low pressure region sticks around. Voila, you have a hurricane, which will always rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere is the same, but now the air will spin counter-clockwise. Right at the equator, there’s no coriolis effect, because as you move north/south, the Earth’s rotation speed doesn’t change. With no coriolis effect, there’s nothing to stop the air from going straight into the low pressure region. Fill in the low pressure region, and no storm.
They could, it is not impossible but since they don’t form near the equator it is extremely unlikely that they would ever get the chance to try.
Due to the Coriolis effect being limited and is zero at the equator. They don’t form too close to the equator either. Because the Coriolis force is too weak there, the air will simply go from high to low pressure without rotating. No rotation, no storm.
Because the Earth is rotating. This causes things that move north or south to change speeds relative to the ground. When you move towards the equator, you appear to slow down, and when you move away from the equator, you appear to speed up. This is called the Coriolis effect. And it also causes tropical storms to rotate the way they do.
The storms aren’t getting pushed by anything, so that slowing they get when they move towards the equator is enough to completely stop any net north/south movement.
When you stand on the north pole how fast are you moving relative to the earth’s core?
Zero, you just spin around in place once every 24 hours.
When you stand on the equator how fast are you moving?
1000mph, you have to circumnavigate the earth in a day.
This difference doesn’t matter much when you throw a baseball, but it absolutely matters when you’re a storm the size of a country. This disparity in relative speed rotates the storm since the equatorial side is moving faster than the polar side, and it provides the swirling structure of the hurricane.
But here’s the problem – storms in the north spin counter-clockwise and storms in the south spin clockwise.
That means to cross the equator you have to stop and reverse direction. That’s not happening, and hurricanes never track near the equator because neither the storm itself nor the prevailing winds that push it around can approach this reversal boundary.
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