Causes Of Ocean Currents | Britannica

Coriolis effect

Earth’s rotation about its axis causes moving particles to behave in a way that can only be understood by adding a rotational dependent force. To an observer in space, a moving body would continue to move in a straight line unless the motion were acted upon by some other force. To an Earth-bound observer, however, this motion cannot be along a straight line because the reference frame is the rotating Earth. This is similar to the effect that would be experienced by an observer standing on a large turntable if an object moved over the turntable in a straight line relative to the “outside” world. An apparent deflection of the path of the moving object would be seen. If the turntable rotated counterclockwise, the apparent deflection would be to the right of the direction of the moving object, relative to the observer fixed on the turntable.

This remarkable effect is evident in the behaviour of ocean currents. It is called the Coriolis force, named after Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis, a 19th-century French engineer and mathematician. For Earth, horizontal deflections due to the rotational induced Coriolis force act on particles moving in any horizontal direction. There also are apparent vertical forces, but these are of minor importance to ocean currents. Because Earth rotates from west to east about its axis, an observer in the Northern Hemisphere would notice a deflection of a moving body toward the right. In the Southern Hemisphere, this deflection would be toward the left. As a result, ocean currents move clockwise (anticyclonically) in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise (cyclonically) in the Southern Hemisphere; Coriolis force deflects them about 45° from the wind direction, and at the Equator there would be no apparent horizontal deflection.

It can be shown that the Coriolis force always acts perpendicular to motion. Its horizontal component, Cf, is proportional to the sine of the geographic latitude (θ, given as a positive value for the Northern Hemisphere and a negative value for the Southern Hemisphere) and the speed, c, of the moving body. It is given by Cf = c (2ω sin θ), where ω = 7.29 × 10−5 radian per second is the angular velocity of Earth’s rotation.