What is CORIOLIS FORCES?

Question

What is CORIOLIS FORCES?

Answer 1

The Coriolis effect is an apparent deflection of moving objects when they are viewed from a rotating frame of reference.

The effect is named after Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis, a French scientist who described it in 1835, though the mathematics appeared in the tidal equations of Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1778. The Coriolis effect is caused by the Coriolis force, which appears in the equation of motion of an object in a rotating frame of reference. The Coriolis force is an example of a fictitious force (or pseudo force), because it does not appear when the motion is expressed in an inertial frame of reference, in which the motion of an object is explained by the real impressed forces, together with inertia. In a rotating frame, the Coriolis force, which depends on the velocity of the moving object, and centrifugal force, which does not depend on the velocity of the moving object, are needed in the equation to correctly describe the motion.

Answer 2

Coriolis forces are the effect of the rotation of the Earth. They are exceedingly subtle; they will cause a pendulum to rotate once every 24 hours, for example. They get substantial when you're dealing with really big things like weather systems: hurricanes turn one direction in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern hemisphere, for example. However, unlike common wisdom, Coriolis forces have basically no effect on the draining of a sink or bathtub. While it's POSSIBLE to experience swirling from Coriolis forces in this scale, it requires unbelievably touchy experiments with perfecty symmetrical sinks with specially designed drains in rooms with ABSOLUTELY NO air circulation, and several weeks for the water to lose all residual angular momentum. Otherwise ambient effects totally drown out the Coriolis force.