A note concerning the Lighthill “sandwich model” of tropical cyclones
- †Department of Mathematics, University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720-3840; and §Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 36 Nakhimov Prosp., Moscow 117218, Russia
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Contributed by A. J. Chorin, June 22, 2005
Abstract
The basic element of Lighthill's “sandwich model” of tropical cyclones is the existence of “ocean spray,” a layer intermediate between air and sea made up of a cloud of droplets that can be viewed as a “third fluid.” We propose a mathematical model of the flow in the ocean spray based on a semiempirical turbulence theory and demonstrate that the availability of the ocean spray over the waves in the ocean can explain the tremendous acceleration of the wind as a consequence of the reduction of the turbulence intensity by droplets. This explanation complements the thermodynamic arguments proposed by Lighthill.
Footnotes
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↵ ‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: gibarenblatt{at}lbl.gov.
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Author contributions: G.I.B., A.J.C., and V.M.P. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
- Copyright © 2005, The National Academy of Sciences
