Hot tower

[1] These formations are called "hot" because of the large amount of latent heat released as water vapor that condenses into liquid and freezes into ice within the cloud.

[4] The launch of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) in 1997 provided the resolution and coverage necessary to systematically catalog hot towers and precisely assess their structure globally.

[10] This mechanism required the existence of undilute cumulonimbus clouds that did not entrain the surrounding air, allowing for the efficient transfer of heat from the ocean surface into the upper troposphere.

A 1961 analysis by Riehl and Simpson using the NHRP data from Hurricane Daisy concluded that hot towers were the principal mechanism by which tropical cyclones move warm air into the upper troposphere.

The newfound importance of hot towers in tropical cyclones motivated the development of parametrization—the representation of small-scale phenomena and interactions, i.e. individual cumulus clouds—in early weather models.

[14] The hot tower hypothesis also inspired the development of convective instability of the second kind (CISK): a conceptual model that emphasized the feedbacks between the latent heat released by individual cumuli and the convergence associated with tropical cyclones.

The data showed that the equivalent potential temperature within hot towers was virtually constant across their entire vertical extent, confirming the lack of entrainment.

[9] Other field observations have suggested that some tropical updrafts are diluted by their surrounding environments at altitudes lower than 5 km (3.1 mi), though strong latent heat generated by ice within the cloud was sufficient to provide the requisite input energy for the Hadley circulation.

[17] In 2007, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hypothesized that the wind shear between the eye and the eyewall could enhance updraft through the center of a cyclone and generate convection.