Clark
(Meteorologist)
Sun Aug 22 2004 02:50 PM
Re: Temperature of Cloud Tops

They were likely talking about in the eye of the storm, where temperatures should be warm (lacking clouds in the strongest of storms). There is strong sinking motion within the eye of the storm, leading to compressional heating. Thus, sometimes at even very high altitudes, you can still get very warm temperatures with very strong storms.

As a complete aside, it's a shame they don't do recon on WPac storms anymore -- we'd be getting some very interesting data, I'm sure. But alas, they stopped doing them a long time ago.



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