What is the pattern of ocean currents in the Southern Hemisphere?
The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have a circular pattern of surface currents called gyres that circle clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern.
What factors contribute to the patterns of ocean currents?
Winds, water density, and tides all drive ocean currents. Coastal and sea floor features influence their location, direction, and speed. Earth’s rotation results in the Coriolis effect which also influences ocean currents.
How does the Coriolis effect impact ocean currents in the northern and Southern hemispheres?
The Coriolis effect bends the direction of surface currents to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and left in the Southern Hemisphere. The Coriolis effect causes winds and currents to form circular patterns. The direction that they spin depends on the hemisphere that they are in.
How do the ocean currents move in the northern and the Southern Hemisphere?
Because of the Coriolis force, the major ocean currents in the northern hemisphere tend to spiral clockwise and they tend to spiral counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere.
How does oceanic circulation patterns influence climate?
Ocean currents act much like a conveyor belt, transporting warm water and precipitation from the equator toward the poles and cold water from the poles back to the tropics. Thus, ocean currents regulate global climate, helping to counteract the uneven distribution of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface.
What are the major ocean circulation patterns?
There are five major gyres: the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the North Pacific, the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean Gyre, see figure 1. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is situated in the Southern Ocean and constantly circles around Antarctica because there are no land masses to interrupt the currents.
What are the four factors that influence ocean currents?
Four Factors That Create Ocean Currents
- Wind. Wind is the single biggest factor in the creation of surface currents.
- Water Density. Another major factor in the creation of currents is water density, caused by the amount of salt in a body of water, and its temperature.
- Ocean Bottom Topography.
- Coriolis Effect.
What 4 factors affect ocean currents?
There are four factors affecting the origin and flow of Ocean Currents i.e. Rotation and gravitational force of the Earth; Oceanic factors (temperature, salinity, density, pressure gradient and melting of ice); atmospheric factors (atmospheric pressure, winds, rainfall, evaporation and insolation); factors that …
How does Coriolis effect influence the direction of wind the Southern Hemisphere?
The Earth’s rotation means that we experience an apparent force known as the Coriolis force. This deflects the direction of the wind to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere.
Why does the Coriolis effect reverse direction between the northern and Southern hemispheres?
Why does the Coriolis Effect reverse direction between the Northern and Southern Hemisphere? The reversal is related to the difference in an observer’s sense of Earth’s rotation in the two hemispheres. … Friction slows horizontal winds blowing within about 1000 m of Earth’s surface.
Why do oceans play a major role in weather patterns on land?
The oceans influence climate by absorbing solar radiation and releasing heat needed to drive the atmospheric circulation, by releasing aerosols that influence cloud cover, by emitting most of the water that falls on land as rain, by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it for years to millions of …
How does the Coriolis effect influence ocean currents quizlet?
The Coriolis effect influences currents. This is due to earth’s rotation, currents are deflected to the right of the northern hemisphere and to the left of the southern. As a consequence, gyres flow in opposite directions in the two different hemispheres.