Tropical Cyclone Life Cycle
🌀 A tropical cyclone progresses through three basic stages: origin/source, the mature stage, and dissipation (death).
🔄 The stages are continuous; a cyclone can weaken over land, re-enter the sea, and strengthen again.

Conditions for Cyclone Formation
🌊 Formation requires a large, still, warm ocean area where the surface temperature exceeds 26.5° Celsius over an extended period.
💨 As warm air rises, it expands, cools, and condenses, forming clouds up to 10 kilometers high in the troposphere, releasing latent heat that powers the cyclone.
🌪️ The Coriolis effect (due to Earth's rotation) causes rising air currents to spiral, marking the mature stage and creating the eye of the storm.

Mature Cyclone Characteristics
🌀 Cyclones rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
💨 The eye wall has the strongest winds, while the eye itself is a calm, clear area formed by descending dense air.
📉 The lowest air pressure is at the center, typically 950 millibars (mb) or less, compared to the average surface pressure of about 1010 mb.
💨 The largest pressure difference results in the strongest wind force; Typhoon Ida in 1958 recorded a low pressure of 877 mb with winds reaching 300 kilometers per hour.

Key Points & Insights
➡️ Cyclone movement follows a track driven by global wind circulation away from its source, sustained by warm ocean waters providing heat and moisture.
➡️ The release of latent heat during condensation is the critical energy source that makes the cyclone a self-sustaining heat cycle.
➡️ The lowest recorded pressure for a tropical cyclone was 877 millibars during Typhoon Ida in 1958.

📸 Video summarized with SummaryTube.com on Nov 14, 2025, 09:55 UTC