• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

There’s A Weird Reason Why Hurricanes Never Cross The Equator

March 21, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons regularly stir up a storm around the tropical stretches of our planet, raising hell wherever they may fall. However, it’s a curious fact that they very rarely approach the equator and – stranger still – never cross it. 

First things first, some terms need to be cleared up. Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same phenomenon, but their names differ depending on where on the planet they are occurring: hurricanes in the North Atlantic and northeast Pacific, typhoons in the West Pacific, and cyclones in the Indian Ocean. To make things easier to follow, we’ll simply be calling all of these tropical storms “hurricanes” in this article.

Advertisement

Hurricanes are like a vast spinning turbine fueled by warm, moist air. They tend to form in tropical seas where the waters are above 26°C (79°F).  

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.

Together with the help of wind, these conditions can cause a storm to enter a spin. Eventually, the mounting clouds above release their rain and dump heat to the surface, further fueling the storm below.

The direction of the wind and the hurricane’s spin is dictated by the Coriolis force, the inertial spinning of an object that’s caused by the rotation of the Earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, the spin of the Earth causes air to be pulled counterclockwise, which results in hurricanes that spin counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite happens and they spin clockwise.

Map showing Tropical Cyclones, 1945–2006, avoiding the equator.=
Tropical cyclones, 1945–2006, avoiding the equator. Data from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center and the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Image credit: Citynoise via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Although they thrive on balmy tropical waters, hurricanes rarely form within 300 kilometers (about 186 miles) of the equator. In 2003, Typhoon Vamei was seen spinning just 150 kilometers (about 93 miles) north of the equator, but that was a real exemption that happens less than once in a century. 

They don’t generate near to the equator because there is no Coriolis effect here, meaning patches of stormy weather don’t tend to “spin up” into a hurricane.

Likewise, we don’t see hurricanes cross the equator as it would effectively mean they’d have to stop spinning, reverse direction, and spin in the other direction to continue. 

Hypothetically, it might be possible for a hurricane to overcome this. Gary Barnes, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Hawaii, explained that it is theoretically possible for a “well developed storm” to be strong enough to continue its momentum over the relatively weak Coriolis force and push through to the equator. 

Advertisement

However, Professor Barnes and others have noted that they have never come across an example of this happening in the real world. 

[H/T: Reddit TIL]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Poland condemns jailing of Belarus protest leaders
  2. China energy crunch triggers alarm, pleas for more coal
  3. China proposes adding cryptocurrency mining to ‘negative list’ of industries
  4. Stranded Dolphins’ Brains Show Signs Of Alzheimer’s-Like Disease

Source Link: There's A Weird Reason Why Hurricanes Never Cross The Equator

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Same-Sex Penguin Couple Adopt And Raise Chick – And They’ve All Got 10/10 Names
  • Dolphins May Not “See” With Echolocation, But Instead “Feel” With It
  • Confirmed! Comet 3I/ATLAS Is Indeed An Interstellar Visitor, Quite Different From Its Predecessors
  • At 192, Jonathan – The Oldest Living Land Animal – Has Lived Through 40 US Presidents
  • 300,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools “Made By Denisovans” Discovered In China
  • Why Do Cats Eyes Glow? For The Same Reason Great White Sharks’ Do, Silly
  • G-astronomical News: Michelin-Starred Meal To Be Served On The ISS
  • In 2032, Earth May Witness A Once-In-5,000-Year Event On The Moon
  • Brand New Microscope Designed For Underwater Reveals Stunning Details Of Corals
  • The Atlantic’s Major Circulation Current Is Showing Worrying Signs, But Is Collapse Near?
  • “The Rings Held The Answer”: How We Finally Figured Out Saturn’s Day Length In 2019
  • Mystery Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” Solved By A Dentist And A Protractor
  • Asteroid Ryugu’s Latest Mineral Is As Weird As Finding “A Tropical Seed In The Arctic”
  • IFLScience The Big Questions: Are We Living Through A Sixth Mass Extinction?
  • Alien Abduction Or A Trick Of The Mind? A Down To Earth Explanation Of Close Encounters
  • Six Months Into Trump’s Presidency, Americans Report Record Low Pride In Being American
  • TikToker Unknowingly Handles Extremely Venomous Cone Snail And Lives To Tell The Tale
  • Scientists Sequence Oldest Egyptian DNA To Date, From A Whopping 4,800 Years Ago
  • “Uncharted Waters”: Large Hadron Collider Begins Colliding Oxygen For The First Time
  • 125,000-Year-Old Neanderthal “Fat Factory” Shows They Gorged On Bone Grease
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version