Backwards Hurricane?

If this hurricane looks a little backwards to you, it's because it's actually a tropical cyclone in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the Northern Hemisphere we're used to hurricanes spinning in a counter-clockwise fashion. But down under they call hurricanes tropical cyclones and their winds blow in the clockwise direction.

This image, captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra Satellite, shows Tropical Cyclone Clare as it makes land on Western Australia's Pilbara Coast on Jan. 10.

At the time the image was taken, Clare was a well-developed storm system with peak sustained winds around 62 miles (100 kilometers) per hour. The storm was downgraded from a Category 3 to a Category 2, but according to reports she had winds as high as 124 miles (200 kilometers) per hour when it struck Dampier and dropped nearly 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain on the coastal town.

Residents of the Pilbara Coast are used to storms like these--this stretch of coast sees more cyclones than any other part of Australia.

While storms south of the equator rotate opposite those in the north, the popular myth that water goes down the drain backwards in the Southern Hemisphere is, however, false.

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: Jesse Allen, NASA MODIS Rapid Response Team