Watch: Atmosphere takes clouds for a dramatic spin — both ways!

A basic staple of meteorology is that low pressure centers spin counter-clockwise while high pressure systems spin clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, thanks to the Earth’s Coriolis Force.

For low pressure centers, it’s usually quite obvious as satellite imagery frequently illustrates the spin of storm clouds around the storm centers, be it mid-latitude storms like we see here in the Northwest all the time, up to hurricanes swirling around a tight eye.

High pressure centers are usually a bit more subtle, since high pressure usually comes with clear skies and thus an absence of clouds to unmask the atmospheric spin under way.

But not so across the South this week. A field of afternoon cumulus clouds formed underneath a high pressure area centered along the Gulf Coast States and then they became caught up in the opposite-flowing spin.