Loading...

factors pressure drops, so you have a positive feedback. And basically the warming of the air in the core makes it less dense and this causes the air pressure at the surface to drop even lower. So when you have this lower pressure, it pulls in even more air from the periphery and this then picks up more heat and moisture from the ocean, strengthening the updraft and you get a positive feedback loop that drives the storm's intensification. Now when a hurricane interacts with land, the first thing, the immediate, the first immediate effect is that you lose that, the moisture inflow to the hurricane because obviously when it's on land it's no longer over the water so you don't have your latent heat engine running nearly as efficiently as it could be because you're not putting as much moisture into the air. So you lose your heat. The second thing that happens, and this is more of a newly discovered phenomenon, is that, so friction from land doesn't necessarily kill a hurricane, but what it does do is as the lowest column of air interacts with land, it obviously slows down a little. But it slows down enough that incoming air parcels sort of get bounced and they actually get forced upwards before they can fully saturate, before they can pick up moisture from the lowest part of the atmosphere and they actually get sent upwards before they're able to fully utilize the latent heat release mechanism or achieve any type of negative buoyancy. So you're essentially throwing denser air in and this has a negative effect because it reduces the angular coefficient and it actually draws energy away from it because the added weight of the air is no longer adding to the angular velocity, it's slowing it down. So you basically have a loss and that's why the eye starts to collapse as it moves inland because everything gets too heavy and you start to slow down. It's like making a little whirlpool with your hand in a lake or a puddle or a pool and then once you stop it eventually closes in because you're no longer inputting energy into the system. Let me drop it.