4 ms·
This home isn't in North America.
by lommaj 3y ago
This home isn't in North America.
- jeffbee 3y ago? Are you suggesting fires rotate counterclockwise in the Pacific or ?
- labster 3y agoAir rises in fires so they are cyclonic (counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, clockwise in the Southern)
- scheme271 3y agoCoriolis effect is common in large (~10s of km) systems but I'm not sure the effect is strong enough to affect something as turbulent as air rising from a fire. At small sizes, like water in a toilet, it's not large enough to determine which direction the water swirls.
- labster 3y agoI hear you but some of the big fire driven storms really do get up to the mid-range of mesoscale, where Coriolis force starts to play a role. It obviously won’t have the same role as synoptic phenomena, but I suspect most fire whirls have cyclonic motion, unless local orography really favors anticyclonic flow.
- labster 3y agoCoastal California and Hawaii are both on the Pacific Plate, not the North American Plate.