I calculated the total kinetic energy dissipation of the Atlantic hurricane season this year...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mkwArB1iLy9CqGnBTxJTFl2uAa-Mt7U9JSIsBBXPQdg/edit#gid=266641897fun fact: the 2015 AHS had a kinetic energy of 1.0565 EJ in total, which is less than Hurricane Andres (at 1.5465 EJ) and hurricane andres was an average cat 4, and only one storm of the 2015 pacific hurricane season
[19:14] oobeinfo exajoules?
[19:15] Kalassak yeah
[19:19] Kalassak these numbers are so huge
[19:19] Kalassak i'm like "Danny never put out more than 1 terawatt of power because it was so tiny"
[19:19] Kalassak 1 terawatt
[19:19] Kalassak that is literally 1 terajoule per second
[19:27] Kalassak terawatts on a TC lifetime scale becomes exajoules
[19:27] Kalassak 10^12 W and 10^18 J
[19:19] Yqt1001 how accurate are these numbers?
[19:20] Kalassak well
[19:20] Kalassak it's not going to be perfectly accurate because wind radii data are not very high resolution
[19:20] Kalassak but there's a paper which describes how to calculate the kinetic energy of a cyclone
[19:21] Kalassak based on integrating its wind radii, max winds, and using the density of air and a drag coefficient
[19:21] Kalassak the latter two which can be assumed to be a constant
[19:21] Kalassak assuming i got those numbers right
[19:21] Kalassak which i took the drag coefficient from the paper
[19:22] Kalassak then the numbers are pretty accurate for a specific case
[19:22] Kalassak only storms which are TS force or higher, and only tropical systems, within their gale force wind radii
[19:22] Kalassak i would imagine their winds outside of that are not exactly negligible, but i can't do much about that
[19:23] Kalassak and for only tropical storm force systems because well, no one tracks tropical depressions consistently and sometimes there are storms stronger than tropical depressions that aren't tropical cyclones (like disturbances, waves, extratrops, post-tropical systems)
[19:23] Kalassak so within reasonable constraints, it's pretty accurate
[19:23] Kalassak it measures what we want it to, basically
[19:24] Kalassak which is the strength of tropical cyclones and being able to compare them
