Nature's Most Dangerous Tantrum

Words by Refath Bari

Cover Photo Chosen by Kazi Maisha

Edited by Sarah Logan and Kazi Maisha

A devastating hurricane in Louisiana. A once-in-a-century flood in New York. And an engine that could never exist. What do they all have in common? The answer takes us back to September 1.

It was the first day of the Fall Semester. I was excited about classes, when suddenly -- my phone buzzed: “A Flash Flood Warning is in effect for this area. This is a dangerous and life-threatening situation.” As an immigrant from a monsoon-worn country and someone who had never experienced a hurricane in the US before, I completely disregarded the warning and thought little of it. As the night wore on, rain pelted the streets and pounded on the windows in a way I had never seen before. Every few seconds, the whole street would light up -- but it was not morning. It was lightning -- followed by another round of relentless rain.

By morning, I heard the stunning news: 45 dead. I thought Ida only struck Louisiana. “It was just so sudden and unexpected -- I mean, I heard there were floods coming, but I thought it was no big deal. Thankfully, where I live in the North Bronx, there was not much damage. I live on the fourth floor of an apartment, so I was pretty safe anyway,” said Jose Rodriguez, a Sophomore at CCNY. How could a hurricane more than a thousand miles away leave 45 people dead here? How does a hurricane even form in the first place and is climate change making it worse?

To understand how hurricanes form, we look no further than the Atlantic. The sun heats up its water and evaporates it into water vapor. Where does that evaporated water go? Up? Down? Think: when you put a rock in a river, it goes down. Why? The rock is denser than the water. If you take a chunk of rock and a chunk of water, the chunk of rock will clearly weigh more. Likewise, if you take a chunk of warm air and a chunk of cool air, the cool air will weigh more and the warm air will weigh less. Why? Instead of weight, think about temperature: the warm air’s atoms are jiggling around more than the cool air’s atoms. That means if you take a chunk of warm air, it is going to have fewer atoms in it than a chunk of the cool air. Thus, warm air is less dense than cool air. All this to say that the warm water vapor rises.

Now, imagine you have an upside-down thermometer and you stick it in the ocean. That means the higher you go, the colder it gets. Down near the ocean, where the sun heats everything up, there is a lot of kinetic energy. Up near the atmosphere, it is a lot cooler. Thus, that evaporated water condenses back into a water molecule, and after sticking onto dust particles in the atmosphere, it becomes a water droplet. Rinse and repeat a few hundred million times, and boom! You’ve got a cloud.

Remember that warm evaporated air that condensed back into a water droplet in the atmosphere? Where did that warmth go? It released into the surrounding air! So, the droplets cool down and in exchange, the surrounding air gets warmer. Now as that water vapor rises through the sky, it leaves a region of low pressure near the ocean. That is where the eye of the hurricane will be. The warm water keeps feeding clouds and soon -- a thunderstorm forms. That low-pressure region left behind by the water vapor draws more moist air towards it, making the storm even stronger.

We now understand how a hurricane forms, but we still do not understand why it spins. So, I asked a few CCNY students for their thoughts. Harry Romus, a junior pursuing a BA in Political Science, asked “does a hurricane’s spin have anything to do with the Earth’s spin?” That is exactly it! The spin of the earth causes the spin of a hurricane, also known as the Coriolis Effect. Let’s understand why.

Say you throw a ball north from Texas, where will it land? Canada? Ah, so you think. But by the time the ball has travelled north, Canada will have gone east, and your ball will have landed in California instead! Why? Because the Earth spins! Where there once was Canada, there will now be California. Thus, when the air from a high-pressure region tries to fill in that low-pressure vacuum, it gets thwarted -- by none other than the spin of the Earth! The result is rapidly spinning winds that form a classic spiral. And voilà, you've got a hurricane.

One of the most magical things about a hurricane is that they are a physical manifestation of an engine that can never exist -- a perfectly efficient engine: the Carnot Cycle. The Carnot Cycle uses temperature and pressure to make gas move a piston. When you heat a gas, it expands -- and you can use that expansion to work on an object (i.e., move a piston). A hurricane, in the same way, leverages temperature (warm water) and pressure (the low-pressure left behind by the water vapor) to wreak havoc once it makes landfall. That is precisely why climate change superpowers hurricanes -- it gives them more fuel, by making our oceans warmer.

“Why is no one asking how a hurricane in Louisiana kills 45 people in the Northeast? I mean, isn’t a hurricane supposed to die shortly after landfall? It’s so weird,” exclaimed Sheila Camacho, a CCNY Sophomore. Atmospheric scientists have warned that such remarkable rainfall would occur after Ida’s core merged with a storm front. In fact, this has happened before. In 1969, Hurricane Camille made landfall in Mississippi, but killed more than a hundred people 800 miles away in Virginia.

As Marie Curie would put it, “We only fear what we don’t understand.” After understanding the physics of hurricanes, I hope you are now as mesmerized by Mother Nature’s most dangerous tantrum as I am.