The younger brother of the inventor John Hadley, George Hadley was born in London and educated at Oxford University. Although called to the bar in 1709, he became more interested in physics and was made responsible for producing the Royal Society of London's meteorological observations.

In 1686 Edmond Halley had offered a partial explanation of the trade winds, pointing out that heated equatorial air will rise and thus cause colder air to move in from the tropics, but could not explain why the winds blew from the northeast in the northern hemisphere and the southeast in the southern.

Hadley put forward the explanation, in his paper Concerning the Cause of the General Trade Winds (1735), that the airflow toward the equator was deflected by the Earth's rotation from west to east. This circulation is now known as the Hadley cell.