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Music.

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Music

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Rob: We have an energy question today. Can you tell us about the energy within a hurricane?

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Jeff: The energy in a hurricane comes from the ocean. Of all

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the places, who would think, but the really warm water in the ocean,

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that causes the water to evaporate. And when

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these molecules leave the surface of the water, they take some heat energy with them, and

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as that heat energy gets up into the hurricane, those water vapor

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molecules condense and they release their heat into the atmosphere.

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And that's how the hurricane gets its power. That warm air we see in the

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center of the storm--the eye--that comes from the ocean basically.

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Rob: Is there a name for that heat?
Jeff: That's called latent heat because

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latent means it's kind of hidden. So you can't put a thermometer in it and measure it directly,

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but it's in those molecules. They're like little mobile solar collectors.

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Rob: And what happens to the energy after the hurricane is dissipating?

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Jeff: So the top of the hurricane behaves like a giant radiator in

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an engine. It's warmer than its surroundings because of all that heat

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and it just radiates it out to space.
Narrator: Researchers from

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NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration work from both

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in the air and on the ground, investigating the energy needed to form hurricanes,

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as well as the energy hurricanes release. Looking at these factors

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may help scientists better predict the strength and paths of the storms

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ensuring the safety of people everywhere. While NASA and NOAA work all around the

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globe studying hurricanes, here's a classroom activity that lets us look at

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real hurricanes and make some observations of our own.

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This activity from My NASA Data allows students to examine sea surface

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temperature to explore how hurricanes extract heat energy from the ocean's

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surface. In this exercise, we have access to data

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and images that researchers and satellites have gathered on Hurricane Rita,

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a Category 5 hurricane that tore through the Gulf of Mexico in September 2005.

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If we want to look at energy on a large scale, this is a

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good place to start. Here, we're looking at the period during

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and right after Hurricane Rita, using data from the GOES and Aqua satellites

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which provide information on clouds and infrared energy from the ocean's

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surface. We'll be creating a time series of images of the Gulf

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of Mexico in order to investigate sea surface temperature changes in the wake

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of a hurricane. Hurricanes cause a large transfer of heat between

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the ocean's surface and the atmosphere. They also cause upwelling,

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which is ocean circulation that brings cold, deep water to the surface.