Start by reading these two pages describing pressure and pressure gradient forces.
Uneven heating leads to convective heat transfer from the warm to the cool region. When this happens at the medium scale of land vs. water near the a lake or ocean, the result is a sea breeze; when it happens at the larger scale of equator vs. poles, we get global convection cells.
Air thus "attempts" to move from high pressure to low, transferring heat in the process. But things get complicated if our unevenly heated, convective atmosphere surrounds a rapidly rotating planet like Earth or Jupiter. The Coriolis effect causes the moving air to "bend" in its path -- at least, as seen from the perspective of someone rotating along with the planet.
Myths to the contrary, the Coriolis effect is utterly unimportant at the small scale of sinks, bathtubs, and toilets. But it is quite important at larger scales. At high altitudes it bends air "trying" to flow straight from high to low pressure, so that we instead get geostrophic winds flowing along lines of constant pressure. Even down at the surface, where friction slows the winds and thus reduces the Coriolis force, air spirals into low-pressure centers (cyclones) and away from high-pressure centers (anticyclones).
(Here's a cyclone on Earth and an anticyclone on Jupiter; both are located in the Southern hemisphere. If you have a decent connection, I strongly recommend movies one and two of these same two features. Note the turbulence in movie #2.)
At a global scale, the Coriolis force turns what would have been a single tropics-to-pole convection cell into three smaller cells, and the bending away from strict north-south motion gives us easterly trade winds and prevailing westerlies at various latitudes. Since water vapor condenses and rains onto the surface in regions of rising, cooling air, we have a pattern of rain forests and deserts on the planet (near the equator and 30° latitude, respectively).
On Jupiter, these global effects are much stronger than on Earth, since the Coriolis force is much larger. Compared to the situation on Earth, gas at Jupiter's equator travels more than ten times as far in one rotation yet takes less than half the time to do it! Hence there is a complicated series of belts and zones: the belts are warm, rising gas "bent" into a rapid easterly wind, while the zones are the cooled, sinking gas bent into a rapid westerly wind. The temperature difference results in chemical differences, which in turn is why belts look different from zones.
Weather Basics on Earth and Jupiter
Written by Chris Magri
Last modified on March 23, 2019
URL: https://sites.google.com/a/maine.edu/magri/phy101/weather