 In addition to environmental steering, a tropical cyclone will tend to drift slowly poleward and westward, a motion known as "beta drift".This motion is due to the superposition of a vortex, such as a tropical cyclone, onto an environment in which the Coriolis force varies with latitude, such as on a sphere or beta plane.It is induced indirectly by the storm itself, the result of a feedback between the cyclonic flow of the storm and its environment.