Hello and welcome to Episode Thirty of Page Turn: the Largo Public Library Podcast. I'm your host, Hannah!
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The English Language Transcript can be found below
But as always we start with Reader's Advisory!
The Reader's Advisory for Episode Thirty is The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayétu Moore. If you like The Dragons, The Giant, The Women you should also check out: Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham, The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, and A Drop of Midnight by Jason Diakité.
My personal favorite Goodreads list The Dragons, The Giant, The Women is on is Profiles in Silhouette.
Happy Reading Everyone
Today’s Library Tidbit is all about the movement of hurricanes.
Hey remember in August when we had two storms in the Gulf at the same time? Why did Marcos and Laura hit roughly the same location when they formed in completely different geographic places?
Hurricanes move along patterns created by global winds. Wind in general happens because of the uneven heating of the earth’s surface by the sun. Hot air rises and cold air sinks. Through convection this causes the atmosphere to move creating wind. Wind moves from the equator to the poles as it heats and then flows back to the equator as it cools.
Now here is where things get a little confusing. Because the planet rotates the air at the equator moves faster than the air at the poles. This means that, in the Northern Hemisphere, as air moves from the equator towards the poles it ends up slightly to the right of the location it began at. This is called the Coriolis Effect. This is why hurricanes rotate. Storms rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere because of this effect.
The Coriolis Effect also causes global winds to move in a large rotation. The interaction of the equatorial winds and the polar winds causes cells to form. The cell nearest to the equator, from about zero to 30 degree latitude is called the Hadley cell. This is the cell where hurricanes form and where the Gulf Stream begins. This cell also creates the trade winds.
As the air at the equator heats and rises to the tropopause, which is the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. As it hits this place air is no longer buoyant and the air rising below it pushes it northward and southward toward the poles. As it moves towards the poles it cools and sinks again. As it gets closer to the surface a frictional return flow pulls the air back towards the equator to rise again. The Coriolis Effect explains why air moving towards the north pole moves easterly and why the air coming back down from the north pole to the equator moves westerly.
This circulation is what causes the North Atlantic Gyre, which is bordered on the west by the north moving Gulf Stream and on the east by the Canary Current which moves south. At the heart of the current is the Sargasso Sea, which, fun fact is where fresh water eels from both North America and Europe mate, but not to each other.
Hurricanes form the same way that the winds that form the Hadley cell. Hot air along the equator rises causing an area of low pressure beneath it. Air from around flows into the new low pressure area. This air warms and also rises. This convection cycle causes the spin characteristic of a tropic storm or hurricane. The more the storm is fed by the hot air flowing the stronger the storm grows and the faster it rotates. The rotation causes an eye to form. The eye of the storm is an area of low pressure. Air that is being displaced by air moving up beneath it actually starts to flow back down through the eye.
Hurricanes move predominately westward off the coast of Africa because the trade winds along the equator move consistently westward. As the storms move, however, the Coriolis Effect takes into effect and the storms begin to move more and more northward and...
