High-pressure area to describe the weather systems generated by highs and lows were introduced in the mid-1800s, mostly by the British. The scientific theories which explain the general phenomena originated about two centuries earlier. The term cyclone was coined by Henry Piddington of the British East India Company to describe the devastating storm of December 1789 in Coringa, India. A cyclone forms around a low-pressure area. Anticyclone, the term for the kind of weather around a high-pressure area, was coined in 1877 by Francis Galton to indicate an area whose winds revolved in the opposite direction of a cyclone. In British English,
High-pressure area arctic air moves over an unfrozen ocean, the air mass modifies greatly over the warmer water and takes on the character of a maritime air mass, which reduces the strength of the high-pressure system. When extremely cold air moves over relatively warm oceans, polar lows can develop. However, warm and moist (or maritime tropical) air masses that move poleward from tropical sources are slower to modify than arctic air masses. In terms of climatology, high pressure forms at the horse latitudes, or torrid zone, between the latitudes of 20 and 40 degrees from the equator, as a result of air