HURRICANES, CLOUDS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Interesting facts about Hurricanes

 

We at BootheGlobalPerspectives have been studying the weather. How much water is floating above our heads in clouds? Why have hurricanes become so big? Why is extreme weather happening all over the world more and more?  How does it work?

Read this. It is important to understand, so pass it on. Feel free to copy this and use it to educate the public.

See these facts: 

One inch of rain over one square mile equals 17.4 million gallons of water weighing 143 million pounds (about 72,000 tons), or the weight of a train with 40 boxcars. Mount Waialeale, Hawaii, is the rainiest place in the world, with an average of 460" (11,680 mm ) each year.

The average cumulus cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds. At any given moment, on a cloudy day, there are millions of pounds of water floating above your head.

1.1 million pounds is the equivalent of about 275 automobiles (the average auto weight).  One can only guess how much the clouds of a hurricane weigh, but it is huge. Enough to cover Houston or a large part of Florida as we have seen in storms in 2017. 

 If all of the water in the clouds were to fall upon the earth, the entire earth would be covered with one inch of water.

So, how to the clouds form?  The cloud forms when sunlight or heat warms the water on earth, and that water evaporates into “vapor.” The vapor is slightly lighter than air and therefore floats up, and we call that vapor “clouds.” That is why a cloud floats. When the cloud vapor cools enough, it condenses back to water, which is heavier than air. It falls as rain, or hail, sleet or snow. 

 The power of a hurricane is hard to fully understand because there is enormous energy. As a child, I was fascinated by storms and still when a thunderstorm comes I love to just watch in awe. Consider how much energy is "going on" with storms.

 

Typically on earth there are 44,000 thunderstorms every day. The average thunderstorm releases the energy equivalent of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb or a small nuclear power plant.

In the clouds, when liquid and ice particles above the freezing level collide, they build up friction, or electrical fields. When the fields are large enough, a giant “spark” occurs between them and the ground or other clouds. (Like static electricity when you touch a doorknob). When we see lightening, we know there are unstable air currents, updrafts or downdrafts, and we also know there is precipitation (the falling water also creates friction). A lightning bolt can reach 50,000 degrees F. (hotter than the surface of the sun).

So when the temperature of the water on earth increases, particularly oceans, there is more evaporation, more water vapor goes up and floats above us. Only when it cools and condenses does it become “water” and falls back. Science shows that water temperatures on the earth have risen to record levels, sometimes three degrees higher than “normal,” with the warming of the climate over the past decades. That leads to more evaporation, leading to more clouds of water vapor, leading to record-breaking hurricanes.

Other radical weather events also are related to this process. This is not theory, this is fact, and every human can see it happening just by looking up or observing what is happening in nature.  

For example, Hurricane Irma grew to sustained wind speeds topping out at 295 kph. The storm was hundreds of miles across with clouds 15 miles high.

 

 

Climate change the cause?

It is a great question.

“We do have conditions now where disasters can be without precedent,” says James Elsner of Florida State University when asked if climate change causes more and bigger hurricanes. “That is the wrong question. A better question to ask is, what kind of storm would it have been without climate change.”  The answer is obvious. Perhaps a less extraordinary one.

It seems obvious that when the waters of our oceans are at record high levels and are rising, that these are facts. They can be and are measured. But some people and institutions, for various reasons, have politicized the subject and some "experts" have been hired to try to discount or distort the credibility of the science. But 98 percent of the educated and credible scientists who study and observe and research our earth's environment quote verifiable data. Over a decade ago, they predicted that the trends of global warming would bring about varied and extreme weather conditions. Everything they predicted has occurred. The millions of people in Mexico, Texas, Florida and the Caribbean Islands can verify the warmer waters, higher tides and the explosive power of storms and hurricanes. In the American West, ranchers point out that mountain glaciers have shrunk. In the Southwest, farmers point out declining water tables, and from Texas to California over 1,000 lakes and rivers have dried up, some to a trickle.   Science and common sense and observation verifies what is occurring in our world. 

 

 

When our oceans are at the highest temperatures since measurements were first taken and rising rapidly, there is an enormous amount of energy sent floating  up into the sky as clouds through evaporation. Thus we see a basic root for extremes of weather. We have all watched and seen this on the news with storms, floods and destruction -- more disastrous storms and weather events than we have experienced in years, some say more than we have seen in a lifetime. Warm the earth and its oceans and expect radical and extreme weather.