On Nov 12, 11:40*pm, Len Wood wrote:
On Nov 12, 11:20*pm, Adam Lea wrote:
On 12/11/12 20:32, Len Wood wrote:
On Nov 12, 7:21 pm, "Ian
wrote:
"Weatherlawyer" *wrote in message
...

Why does the weather flow west to east?
I've been looking at Karman and Bernoulli and all that stuff to get
some idea why the weather dissipates the way it does overland.
To me it just appears vortex shedding and fairly simple convergence/
divergence/convergence/divergence at the west/eastern shores of the
continents.
It goes round and round, eventually ending up at either pole as per
von Karman principles. But (assuming upper levels rotate in the same
direction) there is no real explanation to the direction.

I ruled out Coriolis Effect for two reasons:
1. It is not a force and the west winds are absolute forces, nothing
else but.
2. If it were a phenomenon, Newton would have found it first.
You'd think the heat source would push air eastwards. The fact that it
does happen in some latitudes "occasionally" is immaterial as this
"occasionally" business seems to rely on total calm -which could
actually be seen as proof that the winds aught to be travelling east
to west in ideal conditions.
Which obviously means something is pushing it the other way.

What?

Whilst the following seems to imply an answer to some of my questions
it does in fact fall quite a way short of any of them:

The atmosphere is warmer in lower latitudes.
Thus the atmosphere has more air
at low latitudes than at high.
So the bulk of the atmosphere moves from west to east
(low pressure on its left), carrying the surface features with it.

In the southern hemisphere latitude and Coriolis, cancel out,

I know modern meteorology relies heavily on this Coriolis business for
explanations. It seems daft to me that an absence of force can have so
much force but I must bow to superior knowledge.

I find it amazing that the law escaped Newton. I would have thought
that such an inertial effect would have appealed to him as he mentions
several times the then fairly recently formulated weight of the
atmosphere.

so that there too, surface features generally move from west to east..

Bouncing along as gently as a balloon in an early 1960's French film
yet blowing hard enough to whip the skin of a penguin's penis.

The south coast of Arabia is warmer on the poleward side in summer
disturbances move from east to west with an easterly jet.

Is that the exception that proves the rule or the one that throws a
spanner in the works?

What about the easterly waves in low latitudes? The ones that spawn
those rather intensive weather features called hurricanes?

That is due to the African Easterly Jet, which occurs because the Sahara
is hotter than the equator, reversing the N/S temperature gradient.

I'm sorry but your flow doesn't go.
Not least among reasons is the torpor of the tropics which is a
massive margin of 1016 millibars until it is disturbed by self
contained adiabatic disturbances travelling east to west.

The vertical lapse rate in the Sahara is greater on average
than at the equator so at some height above sea level,
the N/S temperature gradient reverses so the jet reaches a peak
at this altitude then gets weaker higher up.

And the typhoons?

Since the tropical storm seasons rely very much on the size of the
cyclones in the corridor between the three southern continents around
the Antarctic...

And these appear to be vortices shed by the von Karman phenomena...

And these are controlled completely by the extent of the ice
surrounding the polar continent...

None of which "causes" the initiating winds to flow from the western
coastlines to the eastern ones...

We still have this initial problem, to wit:

Why does the weather flow west to east?