Interesting sat view: A train of 5 tropical cyclones in the Central and Eastern Pacific

JKrob says:
August 1, 2014 at 7:23 pm
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I thought that daytime clouds provided a cooling effect and that tropical storms vented a lot of heat in the upper atmosphere, but what do I know.
I’m very interested in what you are saying, primarily because it seems backwards from what I thought and I’m interested in the way the heat transport really works, so please do tell us more- you seem to be a meteorologist, or similarly educated.

“I should have included: “heat” -i.e. “then to where is the heat distributed?”

This is the kind of animation I was thinking of, it should be possible to link the swirling patterns moving across the equator to the could photos but the times scale is a bit course on the animaitons.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/sst/anomaly/anim_2mw.html

MIssed the comment above. Here is a good look at the rotations. They have been there for most of this week…http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/overlay=total_precipitable_water/orthographic=-137.93,19.23,497

krob wrote “All these ideas of latent heat and thunderstorms being ‘magical’ outlets of Earth’s heat needs to stop. It’s wrong and can be understood with a little critical thinking, basic knowledge of the atmosphere structure & understanding of Skew-T charts. ”
My comments to you Jeff,
Please go educate yourself on thermodynamics of tropical cyclones as Carnot 2T heat engines before you embarrass yourself further. You obviously didn’t get taught in college the thermodynamics of what drives a TC (not your fault). You are being fooled by NOAA’s standard OLR anomalies dogma, i.e -tive OLR anom = convection (clouds), +tive OLR anom = suppressed convection (clear sky radiative release from troposphere, i.e night time cooling).
The relevant temps of a TC are ~303 K sea surface waters and ~203 K at the tops of the clouds of a developed TC. That delta 100 K drives a lot of heat release into space when that water is eventually condensed high in those cloud tops, becasue as you mentioned, it is cold at those altitudes (230 K to 200K). They run at about 33% efficiency at those temps. That rising moisture on the way up, coriolis effect spins-up the cloud bands and the winds increase, all driven by latent heat release. Rain falls. Lots of it.
Some simple calculations from college textbooks have calculations showing that a typical Cat 1 Hurricane (on the Saffir-Simpson scale) releases/dissipates about 150 Megatons TNT equivalent energy every 1000 seconds. Typical sea surface temp drops in the top 10 meters after the storm passes is in the range of ~2 K for Cat 1-2 Hurricanes (about a 60 km wide core track) and >3 K in some of the Major TCs. Where does that tremendous amount of heat go? It goes to space under convection transport and condensation release. It is a 2T heat engine.
On the issue that this TC band is at about 10N to 15N. Of course that is above NOAA-defined areas for ENSO SST anomaly analysis. But the warm water upwelling from the Kelvin Wave gets transported wherever nature takes it. In June the bulk of that wave upwelled to the surface off Ecuador, and it now in the last 30 days been transported northward and back west. From NOAA Weekly ENSO update 28 July slide 7 and slide 8 shows it is moving northward in the NH ITCZ while the SH ITCZ is rapidly cooling.

Willis had a good post a couple of months back that included a graphic od the (annual I believe) IR loss to space. It showed a large concentrated loss to space focused along the ~10N that these systems are following. That was interesting and this system following the same general path (~10N) arouses my curiosity again. Why not the equator or 10S? Hummmm.

goldminor says:
August 1, 2014 at 9:54 pm
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Thanks for the link to earth.nullschool.net in your earlier post. Haven’t been there in a while.
As for viewing the surface temps in the wake of a hurricane, I’ve been doing that for a few years now. Obviously there is a LOT of heat removed by convection in a relative short period of time and the cool wake remains for quite a while.

eyesonu wrote, :That was interesting and this system following the same general path (~10N) arouses my curiosity again. Why not the equator or 10S? Hummmm.”
The prevailing NH easterly trade winds provide the kick (disturbance) to initiate a strong rotation in the natural convection (the Coriolis effect can be thought of in the context of Conservation of Angular Momentum).
Those easterly trade winds at 10-15N drive the TC across the Pacific.
The winds at the equator are slack and irregular. 18th and 19th Century mariners who depended on wind power avoided the equator for this reason. The waters of 10 S in the E. Pacific are too cool to allow TC formation. Hence Chilean fishermen normally fish for anchovies in the cold, nutrient rich upwelling Pacific waters off their coast. When it gets “warm” during an El Nino, that is relative, warm meaning not as cold, but still way too cold for TC development.
Indeed, we can see TS Genevieve is falling apart. The conditions, likely cooler water, could not sustain it, and forecasters see cool waters in front of it. In other words, it likely got out in front of the warm June Kelvin Wave remnants that is feeding this band. By mid-August, it will be done as there is no warm water in the Kelvin Wave pipeline coming to backfill and keep it going.

I wrote, “From NOAA Weekly ENSO update 28 July slide 7 and slide 8 shows it is moving northward in the NH ITCZ while the SH ITCZ is rapidly cooling.”
I should clarify that: Slides 7 and 8 shows shifting SST anomalies. Those positive SST anomalies are moving into the surface areas UNDERNEATH the NH ITCZ at around 10-15N. This of course is the “petrol on the fire” that is helping to fire up these tropical storms. The sea surface area UNDERNEATH the SH ITCZ is cooling (negative anomalies) over the past 30 days.

Thank you to Greg and Joel.
I searched ITCZ and read through several sources. There’s much to learn when directed in the right direction. Repeated references to late morning through late afternoon storms resulting in increased convection that would support Willis’ research in the previously mentioned lead post.
If anyone knows the link to that post it may benefit some who are new to discussions involving convection and energy transfer to space.