Each week, our meteorologists answer a question from readers.

Most of our weather comes from a force that doesn't actually exist. It just looks that way because we're standing on a rotating, spherical planet. You may have even heard of the coriolis effect before ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Have you ever wondered why big storms spin like pinwheels instead of sliding straight across the Earth? Or why air and ocean ...

The Coriolis effect happens because of the Earth’s rotation. This force makes things travel in a curve rather than a straight line. In the northern hemisphere, things deflect to the right, and in the ...

It affects ocean currents, weather patterns, and even the direction planes fly. The Coriolis effect has real impacts, but it’s actually just an “apparent force” that causes moving objects to be ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. “Clockwise” and “counterclockwise” refer to ...

It does. The three ingredients needed for hurricane formation are warm oceans, light winds aloft and a sufficiently strong Coriolis effect, an apparent deflective force caused by the Earth’s rotation ...

Have you ever wondered why big storms spin like pinwheels instead of sliding straight across the Earth? Or why air and ocean currents don’t just travel in straight lines across the planet? Well, ...