BUYS BALLOT'S LAW

law of wind direction named for the Dutch meteorologist C.H.D. Buys Ballot, who first stated it in 1857. He derived the law empirically, unaware that it already had been deduced theoretically by the U.S. meteorologist William Ferrel, whose priority Buys Ballot later acknowledged. The law states that in the Northern Hemisphere a person who stands facing away from the wind has high pressure on the right and low pressure on the left; in the Southern Hemisphere, the reverse would be true. Theoretically, the law states that the angle between the wind and the pressure gradient is a right angle. This is almost exactly true in the free atmosphere, but not near the surface, where the angle is usually less than 90 because of friction between the air and the surface. Because of the weakness of the Coriolis effect (produced by the Earth's rotation) in equatorial regions, the law is not applicable there.