Speaker: Dr. Olivier Pauluis (Professor of Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU)
Topic: "Hurricanes as heat engines"
Room: 529 Walker Building (refreshments served)
Time: Thursday Jan 21, 2016 3:15pm to 4:30pm
Abstract: Hurricanes are often described as heat engines that are driven by surface evaporation from the warm ocean and radiative cooling in there troposphere. In this talk, I will show how the thermodynamic cycles that underlies a tropical storm can be extracted from high resolution model data. This analysis shows that while the hurricane behaves as a whole as a heat engine, it differs substantially from a Carnot cycle in that the generation of kinetic energy is substantial reduced both by precipitation and irreversible moist processes.