Is A Hurricane Without Water Still a Hurricane?

[storm_in_a_teacup]

I saw this weird press release today about a scientific paper that claimed tropical cyclones could form on alien planets without any water:
https://www.space.com/extraterrestrial-hurricanes-on-alien-planets.html

There's a link to the actual paper in the article, for those of you who can actually understand meteorology jargon, though you'd need a university internet to bypass the paywall. From what I can gather, the authors used a somewhat different definition of tropical cyclone than what most people think of.

I'm curious what your opinion on this definition would be. I kind of feel like if there's no water involved at all, you need a different name.

(And yes...I am still planning to do that post where I just dump all the hurricane art I did in the past year...I'm waiting until August when the most people will be on the site \o/ )

[USTropics]

I saw this weird press release today about a scientific paper that claimed tropical cyclones could form on alien planets without any water:
https://www.space.com/extraterrestrial-hurricanes-on-alien-planets.html

There's a link to the actual paper in the article, for those of you who can actually understand meteorology jargon, though you'd need a university internet to bypass the paywall. From what I can gather, the authors used a somewhat different definition of tropical cyclone than what most people think of.

I'm curious what your opinion on this definition would be. I kind of feel like if there's no water involved at all, you need a different name.

(And yes...I am still planning to do that post where I just dump all the hurricane art I did in the past year...I'm waiting until August when the most people will be on the site \o/ )

If you simply view a tropical system as an 'engine', you technically don't need the release of latent heat through evaporation/water as your source of fuel. Perhaps in an environment (e.g. foreign planet) that has a different catalyst (some interaction between gases/minerals and a different temperature gradient) you could have a similar result, but not a true 1:1 relationship between a tropical system on Earth. You would also have to account for the Coriolis effect, with a similar axis displacement and rotation.

[storm_in_a_teacup]

Still feels weird if no liquids or clouds are involved at all, but I guess yeah, the Carnot cycle only requires a hot and cold reservoir of some sort, not any specific materials.

[SEASON_CANCELED]

Titan has interesting hydrology. The liquid is actually Methane/Propane and there we can see the oceans and islands...well they are more lakes clustered at the north and south pole. Lots of lakes, tons of them. Some very deep with waves and rivers of Propane. It would be an amazing thing to walk around on the surface of titan or swim in its lakes. It has been suggested that methane based life would be very at home on the planet and possible exist at this very moment. There is some circumstantial evidence already of this, but that is a different topic.



With a maximum surface temperature of -180 °C, its no tropical paradise.

But low pressure zones are all over Titan in the spring at the north and south poles, these zones mimic tropical storms on earth and its suspect that when over the many lakes of Liquid Methane of the North/South pole, these low pressure systems create hurricanes of liquid fuel. We have observed the storms aftermath (flooded areas, disappearing islands, beach erosion) but we have never actually spotted a storm because Cassini doesn't have the right sort of equipment for that but we know they exist. Anybody who loves wierd and far out there kind of stuff should hit google about this one. Its a pretty cool landscape i can imagine and yes I would not hesitate to call the low pressure systems on Titan a hurricane.

Honestly, the only difference the freezing temperatures and the liquid hydrocarbons instead of water. The sky would be very very very dark during one of these storms, since methane in liquid form looks like the T-1000 in terminator 2, and the sky would resemble something out of a horror film. No Lightning, but the ground will erupt in bursts of static discharge.

[terstorm1012]

Titan is definitely cool,and I could see it having hurricanes based on its methane/ethane hydrology.

Titan has volcanoes whose lava is liquid water and ammonia, not molten rock.

[storm_in_a_teacup]

I probably should clarify the journal article was describing hurricanes forming in an atmosphere without any appreciable liquids. No liquid methane, no clouds of droplets, etc. So as weird as Titan storms are, they are more analogous to Earth hurricanes than what the article was modeling.

[SEASON_CANCELED]

I probably should clarify the journal article was describing hurricanes forming in an atmosphere without any appreciable liquids. No liquid methane, no clouds of droplets, etc. So as weird as Titan storms are, they are more analogous to Earth hurricanes than what the article was modeling.

Noted

I just wanted to point out titans unique weather