Gerrard Kaonga
Hurricanes are a terrifyingly fascinating phenomenon but oddly enough they rarely go near the equator and there is a bizarre reason why.
Intense storms are a pretty important part of the weather to study and you should probably be thankful that we do.
It is only through meteorologists looking into these storms that we can put in measures to protect ourselves and predict them in the first place.
But if you live in certain parts of the world they likely don’t bother you that much. While in others, you might be subject to a cyclone, typhoon or hurricane season.
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But let's clarify something real quick, cyclone, typhoons and hurricanes are essentially the same thing - tropical storms.
However, their names differ depending on where on the planet they occur: hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, typhoons in the West Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean.
Now that’s cleared up, why on earth don’t they go near the equator?
Well, tropical storms are a vast spinning turbine fuelled by warm, moist air and they tend to form over warm waters.
The air above the sea surface becomes heated by the warm waters, causing it to rise and cool, forming clouds and thunderstorms. The rising of the air also causes a pocket of low pressure to form underneath, which causes air to rush in.
You still with me for the meteorology 101 lesson?
With the help of winds, this causes the storm to spin and the clouds drop rain and dump heat to the surface.
Now, the interesting thing is the direction of the wind is caused by the Coriolis force - the inertial spinning of an object that’s caused by the rotation of the Earth. Stay with me now.
In the Northern hemisphere of the world the Earth’s rotation causes these storms to spin counter-clockwise and in the Southern hemisphere.... *you guessed it* it spins clockwise.
Tropical storms do not generate near the equator because there is no Coriolis effect there.
So, what about passing over across the equator? Well, in essence it would mean a tropical storm would spin one way, pass the equator, and then have to stop and spin the complete opposite direction.
Gary Barnes, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Hawaii, has said it is theoretically possible a storm could pass through the equator and keep spinning the same way if it was strong enough but there has never been an example of this in the real world.
After learning the tropical storm fact, many social media users branded it 'insane' while another simply joked they just 'hurrican’t'.