A team of Johns Hopkins University and Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have explained how big storms become really big storms.
Using theoretical analysis, computer simulations and lab experiments, the team found that large fluid vortices ? such as hurricanes and typhoons ? raid smaller neighboring storms in an energy grab that causes the smaller storms either to wither away or renew themselves by turning to still smaller storms.
“This discovery is important because it could lead to a better understanding of how hurricanes and large ocean eddies form,” said Shiyi Chen, a professor in Johns Hopkins department of mechanical engineering. “It should help us to create better computer models to make more accurate predictions about these conditions.” Chen holds the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. chair in engineering and science and is one of the three authors of the study.
The team, including Chen, mechanical engineering grad student Minping Wan and Gregory Eyink, a professor of applied mathematics and statistics, looked at the formation of turbulent flows of gas or liquid, such as Earth?s hurricanes and the Red Spot on Jupiter, a storm on our solar system?s largest planet that is bigger than double the size of Earth.
The computer modeling part of the project was done at Hopkins and the lab experiments at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where Eyink current is the 2006 Ulam Scholar at the laboratory?s Center for Nonlinear Studies.
Eyink, the project?s primary theorist, compared the energy transfer from smaller to bigger storm as a vampire like process, in which the large-scale storm “acts like a vampire, sucking the energy out of the smaller one. We end up with a group of large predator vortices preying on smaller ones, which in turn prey on smaller ones still, forming a food-chain of vortices,” or storms, Eyink said.
The team used an additional metaphor, describing the process of a big storm seizing a small storm as a “hostile takeover,” a Wall Street power grab by a powerful company that leaves a smaller firm depleted, or history. The study appears in March in Physical Review Letters.
