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 Storm Cristobal (2002) system over the Mid-Atlantic States produced rip currents and 4 foot (1.2 m) waves along the south shore of Long Island, New York; three people drowned from the rip currents. Two ships recorded tropical storm force winds in association with the storm; the vessel with the sign WUQL reported sustained winds of 47 mph (76 km/h) from the west-southwest on August 7. Tropical Storm Cristobal (2002) Tropical Storm Cristobal was a relatively weak tropical cyclone that meandered in the western Atlantic Ocean prior to being absorbed into a frontal zone. The third named storm of the 2002 Atlantic hurricane season,