ych 5 It sounds so interesting to us the way it all works, and fun to observe, but imagine the pressure on scientists earlier this century who were in charge of launching missiles! Before they could be programmed on where to strike, those in charge of launching them had to carefully factor in the Coriolis effect, or else the missile would land completely off target. But what does the Coriolis effect have to do with hurricanes? Hopefully you've figured it out by now. The hurricane, nothing more than a high-pressure mass of clouds and strong winds, resides above the earth while the earth spins beneath it. So, like the ball on the merry-go-round, or a missile, a meteorologist has to take into careful consideration the Coriolis effect when trying to predict the path of a hurricane, because the direction it's heading will rotate with the Earth, and a new location will be in it's path. Other aspects of life affected by the Coriolis effect include aircraft flights and NASA space-shuttle launches. Also, if it wasn't for the friction between your car tires and the road while travelling on a highway, the Coriolis effect would pull your car 1500 feet to the right for every 10 miles traveled!4So what are the practical applications after a study on hurricanes? Fortunately for those of us who live in Michigan, hurricanes don't affect us like they do the coastal states. In the past, the only two things that hurricanes have done to Michigan are 1) swirl a mass of rain-laden clouds in our direction and gave us a day or two of steady rain, and 2) prevented masses of high-pressure to move eastward, giving us days of calm and clear weather. With the advent of Doppler radar, hurricanes are very easy to track, and the National Weather Service does a good job of issuing warnings and watches, giving people ample time to leave town until the storm is over or board up their house. But no matter how well you can track a hurricane, or even predic...
