Intertropical Convergence Zone of human errors which ultimately doomed the flight. Most aircraft flying these routes are able to avoid the larger convective cells without incident. Intertropical Convergence Zone The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), known by sailors as the doldrums or the calms, is the area encircling Earth near the Equator, where the northeast and southeast trade winds converge. The ITCZ was originally identified from the 1920s to the 1940s as the "Intertropical Front" ("ITF"), but after the recognition in the 1940s and the 1950s of the significance of wind field convergence in tropical weather production, the term "ITCZ" was then applied. When
Subtropical ridge and western peripheries. As the subtropical ridge varies in position and strength, it can enhance or depress monsoon regimes around their low-latitude periphery. Heating of the earth near the equator leads to large amounts of convection along the monsoon trough or Intertropical convergence zone. This air mass rises to the lower stratosphere where it diverges, moving away from the equator in the upper troposphere in both northerly and southerly directions. As it moves towards the mid-latitudes on both sides of the equator, the air cools and sinks. The resulting air mass subsidence creates a subtropical ridge of high pressure near