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 instability waves El Niño conditions are present. Tropical instability waves are not related to tropical waves, which are atmospheric disturbances that propagate westward along the Intertropical Convergence Zone, sometimes giving rise to tropical storms. In both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a tongue of cold surface water usually extends westward along the equator from the continental margins. These "cold tongues" consist of water upwelling from the ocean depths, and are surrounded by warmer surface water in both hemispheres. The temperature difference between the cold tongues and the surrounding warm water is largest during the southern hemisphere winter. The Pacific cold tongue is