Neil deGrasse Tyson Talks Hurricanes

so what's the deal well hurricanes clearly the worst Seinfeld ever the Seinfeld imitate you yeah every once in a while he pretends he's broke [Music] [Applause] [Music] I mean seriously what what is it that makes a hurricane hardly okay so I can tell you sort of the physics of a hurricane all right the ocean we think of as just a place to dip your feet in or a sail across or to fly over it is a fundamental driver of what goes on in Earth's atmosphere what's the hottest month not June that's gonna be July or August right part of that time delay comes about because the ocean is up taking this heat that's it okay so one of the great drivers of everything that happens on earth is the ocean okay because it's a big up taker of many things of heat from the Sun of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere you can just absorb it all right and then come out later so what happens hurricane season is after we have peak heating of Earth in the northern hemisphere okay peak heating is in June when the sun's angle on the earth's surface is at its highest okay and then the Sun is working its way down we're approaching fall and winter but the ocean which had been up taking that heat is now given some of that back and so the hotter the ocean is relative to the air the more you have unstable air above it and warm moist unstable air don't go there warm we're working together to moist unstable air yes is a recipe for making clouds okay okay right okay so it's moist and warm so so it's moist so it's got water vapor in it it's warm so it's warmer than a ceramics it'll want to rise as you rise it gets to cooler and cooler air temperatures and when you're cool that the air can't hold that much water in vapor anymore and it condenses out makes clouds right that's it okay warm moist unstable air you get clouds so watch what happens where this zone kicks in has low air pressure mm-hmm Wow if your cloud anywhere and there's high pressure over here in low pressure over there where you going I'm going over to the love you're going to the low-pressure that's the high pressures pushing you the worse when she pulled ya sister all the clouds head towards the low-pressure system right all of them clouds okay so no watch if you come in from the sides all fine you just come straight in straight okay no watch if you come in from below I'm coming from you got a picture of this now these are rotating earth do you realize the equator is moving faster than we are of course because it has a bigger circumference light like a record on a record player oh my god it's like a merry-go-round right like a regular the outer horses are moving at whatever animal it is they're moving faster because they have a bigger circumference yet they all finish one circle at the same time all right so watch so I'm trying to get to that low-pressure system and I'm closer to the equator than it as I go towards it my sideways motion exceeds the sideways motion of the parts of the earth I am now passing over right I exceed that so I'm trying to aim for the low-pressure system but I overtake it right off to the right what's me wait now I'm a I'm a cloud north of the low-pressure system right and I try to go towards it but I'm going slower than it right so I come in also to the right behind it okay and so this forces a circulation in the low-pressure system that is counterclockwise and all clouds are trying to get there at the same time and you have a storm all the moisture is being gathered up from all the region right and putting it and that low prejudice at one point and that's why we have these arbitrary definitions if it's above this speed it's a tropical storm if the rotation speed is even higher then it's a hurricane so the lower the pressure is in the low-pressure system the more potent it is of gas during clouds from farther away and this creates a basically a circulation and it's true for all low pressure systems in the northern hemisphere so what are whatever you call them what in the Pacific is it a cyclone and whatever trapples will depress yeah whatever tornadoes monsoons what even tornadoes if we look at the circulation it's counterclockwise there are rare exceptions in a tornado case you can have something that'll sort of force it and it'll overcome what the earth is trying to do to it but basically all of this is counterclockwise and then people say how about my toilet which way does my poop go down the hole it goes down whichever way the Jets are pointing in your toilet oh the rotation of the earth don't Kant doesn't care about the radius in your toilet right ok a little too small it's a little too small a little too small let's just mark where it goes from the edge of the toilet to the middle the rotation there there's a non-factor that's there you can calculate how much effect that is it's it's swamped by anything that's going on inside the toilet it's specially the Jets that's it so into the southern hemisphere all of this happens the other way and storms then turn clockwise that's so that you get a hurricane and so the warmer the earth is the more moisture gets evaporated into the air and the more moisture there is to make clouds and okay so the more whether you have we associate weather with what the water in the air is doing is it coming out as hail sleet snow rain that we call that wet it's and it's all water it's all water it's just water twelve ways that's it Wow yeah right is there a name for just the swirling yeah yeah that's it so this this was first studied by physicist named Coriolis and so it's called the Coriolis force or the Coriolis Pavia they call it force it's really not a force it's just I have a different I'm do I will overtake the low-pressure system headed towards it in the northern hemisphere and if you look at it's like something's pushing it to the side and so in that sense there's what we call a fictitious force but it's still useful to think about it as a thing the Coriolis force of Coriolis force oh yeah so you better hope if you have a hurricane it comes very low tide like right all right but hurricanes last weeks as they come up the coastline somebody is getting high tide on landfall hurricane sandy in New York City it what by the time it hit us it wasn't a hurricane it was like a tropical depression but it's really large and was not only high tide but there was the circulation of the air was bullsh in the ocean towards the shore so there's this sorcerer storm surge on top of the high tides breached our walls I was out of I didn't have electricity for a week I lived downtown I was dark it was truly Gotham nice it was the dark night figure out if what you learn will stick all right there's a quiz on the Coriolis effect on hurricanes at brilliant dot or say you're on a merry-go-round that's rotating clockwise and you throw a ball directly towards the center how will you see the ball move do you think it will travel in a straight line or be curved to one side now one of the many cool things about brilliant is that you learn by playing with interesting puzzles that build upon each other did you ever imagine that playing on a merry-go-round can illustrate how hurricanes work I never did but now it makes so much sense and I understand how scientists think about it even if you don't know something right off the bat the site walks you through various aspects of the concept so that you have a deeper understanding and apply that to various scenarios so to keep learning go to brilliant dot org slash Startalk the first 782 of you will get 20% off their annual subscription hey if you want to see more videos from Starr talk hit the subscribe button clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on your hemisphere and click the little bell so you can get notified each time we upload a video this bill is so Pavlovian it really knows I like this video and as always keep looking up unless it's a hurricane coming then seek shelter [Applause] [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 271,155

Rating: 4.9575419 out of 5

Keywords: Neil deGrasse Tyson, StarTalk, chuck nice, coriolis effect, coriolis force, coriolis, clouds, storm, typhoon, disaster, ocean, heat, moist, air, hurricane season, low pressure, high pressure, equator, monsoon, tornado, hemisphere, fictitious force, low tide, high tide, hurricane sandy, tropical depression, explainer, science, podcast, storm surge

Id: yeQxLQZFLXE

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kenlubin]

I've been trying to build my mental model of hurricane formation for a while, but it hadn't occurred to me that hurricanes form in September-October when the oceans are warmer than the atmosphere. That temperature difference is driving energy stored in the oceans into the atmosphere. Thanks, Neil deGrasse Tyson!