Behind Chaos: The Tropical Cyclones

Tropical cyclones, also called hurricanes or typhoons, appall mankind and devastate our environment. Formed during the hot season, tropical cyclones act like valves releasing the heat accumulated in the tropics.

Safety valves also evacuate energy and sometimes lead to disastrous accidents that can be global in scope. For example, the initial cause of the Three Mile Island accident, the worst nuclear accident ever to occur in the USA, is to be sought in the behavior of a valve. Recent developments in thermodynamics show that flows in this valve had deeply penetrated the chaotic field.

As the same physical process can produce similar phenomena at extremely different scales, this suggests that chaos would also be likely to appear during the formation of a tropical cyclone.

There are many other analogies between the confined flows in thermal power plants and the open sky phenomena analyzed by specialists of earth and ocean science. In both cases, phenomena are subjected to the laws of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Starting from the field of energetics, this article will attempt to show, in particular, that a tropical storm subjected to very strong constraints can actually enter a state of chaos before becoming a dreaded tropical cyclone, which gets rid of its motive power by wreaking havoc on the land of men.

Read more in the article published by: « International Journal of Applied Environmental Sciences » (2018)

hurricane physics Chaotic System of Tropical Cyclones