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I was cleaning up my mail account and noticed a post I made a couple of
months ago in which I raised some questions but never bothered to answer
them. For completeness, in case (or in the hope that) someone happens to
chance upon the questions (in the archive?) and wants to know the answers,
here they are.
First the questions...
P.S. A good physics question is to ask why the winds feel only a coriolis
force and not a centrifugal force. Another good one is to ask how one
might roll a ball down a plane and have it *not* experience a coriolis
force (granted, the coriolis force would be small in any case, but there
is a way to get it to go to zero).
1. The winds do not "feel" the centrifugal force because we the normal
force (of the surface) has a slight centripetal component that cancels out
the centrifugal force. In other words, we define a horizontal surface as
that surface for which there is no horizontal forces on an object at rest.
That is, a horizontal surface is *not* the surface of a sphere. If it
was, everyone would be leaning slightly poleward (to counteract the
centrifugal force) just as someone leans toward the center of the circle
when walking in a circle.