Trade winds Fontaine Maury collected enough information to create wind and current charts for the world's oceans. As part of the Hadley cell, surface air flows toward the equator while the flow aloft is towards the poles. A low-pressure area of calm, light variable winds near the equator is known as the doldrums, near-equatorial trough, intertropical front, or the Intertropical Convergence Zone. When located within a monsoon region, this zone of low pressure and wind convergence is also known as the monsoon trough. Around 30° in both hemispheres, air begins to descend toward the surface in subtropical high-pressure belts known as subtropical
Tropical Atlantic Variability Atlantic Nino event, eastern area of Atlantic will appear warm SST anomalies accompanying a relaxation of trade winds. This mechanism, which is known as Bjerknes Feedback, is similar to El Nino/Southern Oscillation( ENSO). “On interannual and longer timescales, no single mode seems to dominate. Instead, several mechanisms are responsible for tropical Atlantic variability. On the equator, both observational and modeling studies indicate that there is a Bjerknes-type air-sea coupled mode arising from the interaction of the equatorial zonal SST gradient, ITCZ convection, zonal wind, and thermocline depth.” Tropical Atlantic Variability The Tropical Atlantic Variability (TAV) is influenced by internal interaction