134
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How can a storm drop 40 inches (1 metre) of rain?
You were right to question whether the atmosphere really held that much water. It comes nowhere close! We use precipitable water to track this, which is the measure of all moisture in the entire ...
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How can a storm drop 40 inches (1 metre) of rain?
I invite correction if I missed any details, the column of air above you, at any one time, at 100% humidity can hold maybe 3-6 inches (75-150 mm) of water depending on temperature and it's likey to ...
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21
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Would hurricanes on an ocean planet continue indefinitely?
No. As it is, many hurricanes never make landfall. In an oceanic world I could see three fates happening:
Hurricanes that dissipate due to dynamical features or climatological features.
By dynamical ...
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Why did Hurricane Ida have so much precipitation when it reached the Northeast?
First, it's good to note that it really wasn't much of Ida that went that far... in terms of the strength of the low pressure (and the resultant wind), while the swampy waters in southern Louisiana ...
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Would hurricanes on an ocean planet continue indefinitely?
What is possible in a low-friction world is illustrated by the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, an anticyclonic storm that has has been continuously observed that fluid planet's surface at least since 1878 (...
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How can a storm drop 40 inches (1 metre) of rain?
Harvey is almost stationary and is rotating new gulf moisture up the "dirty" side (east of the center). I am outside the main path and have 10+ inches (250 mm) in 30 hours (emptied the rain gauge ...
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Do hurricanes cool the earth?
Hurricanes can be viewed as having primary and secondary circulations. The primary circulation is what we see in satellite photos, comprising the winds and clouds that circle the low pressure zone at ...
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10
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Has a hurricane or cyclone ever reformed after passing over a large land mass?
Since you don't seem interested in Atlantic-Pacific crossovers, of which there are several good examples.....
2004's Hurricane Ivan made landfall on the Gulf Coast, degraded into a tropical ...
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Have there ever been simultaneous cyclones in the same ocean but different hemispheres?
It does occasionally happen. Not often, because to kick-start a hurricane there has to be some rotation to start with, from the Coriolis effect, together with a sea surface temperature of >27 °C (+...
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7
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Impossible or improbable? Hurricane crossing the equator
The Coriolis effect is necessary for FORMATION but NOT for MAINTENANCE of a tropical cyclone.
Once formed, in a full-fledged tropical cyclone of hurricane intensity the wind balance is cyclostrophic,...
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How is it possible that a Hurricane such as Alex forms in the Atlantic in winter?
Alex was an out of season freak event that bucked the trend and broke all the rules. As hurricanes go, it was somewhat weak, and could never have strengthened beyond category 1. Three conditions made ...
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Do hurricanes cool the earth?
To summarize David's great answer for folks perhaps looking for an answer more approachable to a wider audience: the answer is a thorough yes to the main question.
Hurricanes do have a cooling impact.
...
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How did a tropical storm starting with "D" end up next to a typhoon starting with "T"?
The naming of typhoons, in the north west pacific region, is different to that used by other parts of the world. According to accuweather,
For typhoons, there is one list with 140 names submitted ...
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7
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Why did Hurricane Ida have so much precipitation when it reached the Northeast?
You're asking about several different aspects so let me try and get them in order.
The slow drop off in rainfall is in fact because of the Brown Ocean Effect just a bigger one than we've seen before. ...
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6
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How is it possible that a Hurricane such as Alex forms in the Atlantic in winter?
Alex was a weird development, being only the second ever recorded in any month to form north of 30°N and east of 30°W, the only other being Hurricane Vince in 2005. It developed over waters cooler ...
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6
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When there is snow on the ground, can a hurricane still form?
First off, hurricanes form in tropical seas over warm water. In general, they form in places where it never snows at all. Also, they form over the ocean, and it is hard to have snow on the ground in ...
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How can a storm drop 40 inches (1 metre) of rain?
The atmosphere can "hold" only maximum 75mm worth of precipitation at any given locality, this is true.
However, this particular hurricane Harvey was a very slowly moving structure. The vortex would ...
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How to open AVHRR files downloaded from NOAA CLASS?
You can use the Python library satpy to read AVHRR GAC data:
...
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5
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How can a storm drop 40 inches (1 metre) of rain?
The precipitable water vapor content of the air never exceeds about 3 inches even in the most humid tropical maritime air masses, and in most maritime tropical air masses is typically closer to 2 ...
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5
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Could we cool the ocean by reflecting away sunlight to influence hurricanes?
Water has a large thermal capacity.
which is why the temperature change between seasons is gradual rather than sudden, especially near the oceans.
For water to lose heat time is required. By ...
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5
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Why do hurricanes hitting the US East Coast seem to go north once hitting land?
It is mostly due to the Coriolis effect (aka Coriolis Force). (Another reference here) Because of the Coriolis Effect, parcels of air (think of boxes of air) in the northern hemisphere are deflected ...
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5
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Why exactly did the use of Greek letters as names for Hurricanes happen the first place, despite the fairly obvious and predictable impracticalities?
Well for one major reason, the assumption was that seasons with so numerous hurricanes were rare. Canonically, tropical cyclones typically follow a Poisson Distribution. If you consider that, of the ...
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4
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Why does air subside in the Eye - the lowest pressure area of a tropical cyclone?
I will just talk about an already formed tropical cyclone. Converging winds spiral in (counterclockwise in northern hemisphere) over the warm ocean waters towards the central low pressure area of the ...
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Have there ever been simultaneous cyclones in the same ocean but different hemispheres?
Today (February 22nd 2019) There are cyclones/typhoons/hurricanes in both the North and South Pacific - Wutip east of Philippines, Oma East of Australia. They are not twin cyclones as defined above, ...
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Have there ever been simultaneous cyclones in the same ocean but different hemispheres?
To add to Gordon's answer, Cyclone Twenty-five was also called Cyclone Raquel and it was an "off-season" cyclone, as the following reported in the news. It was the first cyclone recorded in the region ...
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4
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Website that contains the maps of atmospheric pressure and wind speeds
Check out this beta data portal from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies / University of Wisconsin-Madison
CIMSS Tropical Cyclones
Data Archive http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/...
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Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible