Physics and Future of Hurricanes

It turns out that hurricanes, as revealed by the new discovery, are usefully regarded as a separate phase of matter, bringing in characteristic temperature dependences near their transitions. The role of phase change in understanding hurricanes brings in the 20th-century discoveries in theoretical physics relating to critical phenomena with non-intuitive values of the critical exponent β entering the formula P = const (T – Tc)β, where P is a characteristic strength parameter, or order parameter, of the phase of matter appearing at Tc. According to the new discovery on hurricanes, it appears that taking the wind velocity as the order parameter P, the critical exponent is near 1/3. In a second discovery, we find that a small correction to this value is brought in by the complicated physics of the renormalization group, that earned K. G. Wilson the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1982.