A Question About Convection In Hurricanes

[storm_in_a_teacup]

This is going to sound like a really stupid question but, my field is active galactic nuclei not tropical cyclones so please have mercy on me.

Here we go: what keeps the thunderstorms in a hurricane from choking themselves off with their own downdrafts?

Like, I know with supercells the high levels of wind shear separate the updraft and downdraft and this lets them persist for longer than normal, but there's not that much wind shear in hurricanes so what prevents a rain-cooled downdraft from choking the updraft?

Is it that the individual thunderstorms do die off, but they trigger the formation of new ones downwind and create the illusion of spiral bands physically moving? (I think that's how mesoscale convective complexes work, but I don't really know...)

[al78]

It is definitely not a stupid question. From what (little) I understand about the internal structure of the hurricane, there are few downdrafts in the eye wall. The descending air is found in the eye, the moat (a clear area between the outer and inner eye wall, and between the spiral rainbands.

http://www.hurricanescience.org/science ... structure/

It is possible to get occasional intense downdrafts (microbursts) in the eye wall which bring higher momentum air to the surface and locally enhance the surface wind.

[GCANE]

The warm core, or eye, tilts the updraft away from the center of circulation.

I'll explain in detail:

Air parcels coming into the core near the surface of the ocean are heated and moistened by the water.
When they get into the core, they suddenly are under a cold pocket of air above the boundary layer in the atmosphere.
The boundary layer is between the ocean surface and about 850mb.
Since the air parcels are warm and moist and the air above is cold, the air parcels accelerate vertically.
Above the cold air pocket is the warm core which usually exists about 8km to 15km in altitude.
As the air parcels lift up in the atmosphere they begin to circulate cyclonically due to the Coriolis force around the center of the storm.
The air parcels then hit the warm core and slow down their accent rate because they are less buoyant in the warmer air.
At that point, they deflect outward away from the core.
The air parcels then rise further until they condense and turn to water.
The water then drops creating the downdraft.

So the updraft at the ocean level begins closer to the CoC and the downdraft is farther away.

This is all in an idealized, vertically stacked TC.