Why Can't Hurricanes Form In Lakes?

Question

I Was Wondering..Why Can't Hurricanes Form In Lakes?
it might be a dumb question but...

Answer 1

Good question! There are no lakes big enough. Hurricanes are giant storms and form over their development for often over 1500 miles.

Answer 2

Well for a hurricane, you need a source of warm water for it to gain energy from. Thats what powers hurricanes, warm water and plenty of moisture. Lake Michigan is often too cold for hurricanes (patches freeze in the winter, and its also a chilly 70 degrees in summer. So I doubt that a hurricane can form. Also, hurricanes don't form spontaneously. They form from atmospheric disturbances near Africa, grow into tropical storms and depressions, then into a hurricane. If you notice, most hurricanes have long paths which they develop upon. Looking at the length of Lake Michigan, you may have a storm form over the water, its very common. However, to see that storm move over a short path of cold water (the lake) and still keep forming a hundred miles from either end of the lake is impossible. Hurricane huron wasn't an actual hurricane. It was just a common low pressure thunderstorm. Just for some reason we do not understand, it started rotating very slowly and developed an eyewall just like a hurricane.

Answer 3

hey

im no weather man but i know this!

hurricanes form in oceans becuase the ocean meets with with a warm and cold front which causes a tropical storm. the winds meeting at the fronts cause high winds whitch turn into what you know as a hurricane. they dont form in lakes becuase lakes do not have wind streams ware the warm and cold front meet up at (watch the weather next time it comes on the blue and red curved things are wind streams) and the evaporation of water erraticates the hurricane by being evaporated in a siphon. by the way that isnt a stupid question

Answer 4

I think it's because lakes are not big enough or warm enough to develop a hurricane. And it's not a stupid question I will watch this question to find out what the answer really is.

Answer 5

Hurricanes need the vast open ocean between Africa and North America to form and grow. Even the Gulf of Mexico is not large enough to generate a hurricane by itself, although it does quite a job of regenerating some of them.

Answer 6

Ok, cyclogenesis, the technical term for generation of a tropical cyclone (aka hurricane or typhoon) requires a few key things. One is a very large pool of warm water. (Warm water is key, as several other responders have pointed since convection driven by evaporation of water is the energy source. (This is because a tropical cyclone (TC) is a big engine that turns warm water into wind.)) The second thing is conditions where there is very little vertical shear, meaning the winds aloft aren't significant. (I'll come back to shear in a bit.) The third thing you need is a space big enough for the convection, or evaporation of water, to get organized, which is where lakes get affected.

In the formation of a tropical cyclone, first the convection has to set up into plumes, which we see as thunderheads. Once you get enough of these in the same general area a couple of things happen. One is I run away because those storms are big and scary looking. The second is that the rising air from all these big plumes in one general area leads to an airflow towards the convection source. If that happens on a big enough area, Coriolis (see below) comes into play and the moving air starts to curve. The curving motion of the air due to Coriolis is where the TC gets its characteristic spinning motion. (And since Coriolis goes the other way in the Southern Hemisphere, you will find Australian typhoons spin counter to hurricanes in the Atlantic. Anyway, with this spinning, the convection now organizes into bigger and bigger cells and once these cells close into a circle, voila, c'est tropical cyclone and I am heading inland.

Lakes have water that is plenty warm enough to get a TC going, but they lack size to get the convection organized and get Coriolis involved. Even the Great Lakes aren't big enough for that to happen. In contrast, not to dispute a previous responder, but the Gulf of Mexico is plenty big enough for hurricanes to spin up, Coriolis works just fine and only takes a few hundred kilometers or so. There are lots of cases where a tropical depression went to raging huge cyclonic storm in the Gulf.

Ok, I've rambled on a long time and you are starting to grumble: "What does the damned shear have to do with anything?." Well, see, if there is a lot of wind shear, the convective plumes gets blown away, sort of, before they have time to organize and get Coriolis involved.

Some of you may be wondering what the Sam Hill is Coriolis. That is a fictitious force that arises when you move things around on a spinning spherical body. Nobody wants me to try to explain Coriolis in detail, the last time I tried there were several fatalities from people chewing their brains off to get away. In a nutshell, Coriolis is caused by the fact that things rotating around on a sphere have different tangential velocities depending on their latitude on the sphere. Things towards the poles are moving slower than things on the equator. In the context of air, in the northern hemisphere, if air from the north is rushing south to replace air being convected aloft in a hurricane, the southward moving air isn't moving as fast to the east as the air already south so the southward moving air deflects westward. see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect

Anyway, the bottom line is that lakes simply aren't big enough to have coriolis play a role in getting any convection organized. In addition, in general the surrounding land masses probably generate a lot of vertical shear due to onshore/offshore flows.

Free beer if you read this far.

Answer 7

hurricanes need sufficient heat evaporation over a large area and most lakes are cool and not large enough to allow a hurricane to form.