Revisiting the 26.5°C Sea Surface Temperature Threshold for Tropical Cyclone Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A high sea surface temperature is generally accepted to be one of the necessary ingredients for tropical cyclone development, indicative of the potential for surface heat and moisture fluxes capable of fueling a self-sustaining circulation. Although the minimum 26.5°C threshold for tropical cyclogenesis has become a mainstay in research and education, the fact that a nonnegligible fraction of storm formation events (about 5%) occur over cooler waters casts some doubt on the robustness of this estimate. Tropical cyclogenesis over subthreshold sea surface temperatures is associated with low tropopause heights, indicative of the presence of a cold trough aloft. To focus on this type of development environment, the applicability of the 26.5°C threshold is investigated for tropical transitions from baroclinic precursor disturbances in all basins between 1989 and 2013. Although the threshold performs well in the majority of cases without appreciable environmental baroclinicity, the potential for development is underestimated by up to 27% for systems undergoing tropical transition. An alternative criterion of a maximum 22.5°C difference between the tropopause-level and 850-hPa equivalent potential temperatures (defined as the coupling index) is proposed for this class of development. When combined with the standard 26.5°C sea surface temperature threshold for precursor-free environments, error rates are reduced to 3%–6% for all development types. The addition of this physically relevant representation of the deep-tropospheric state to the ingredients-based conceptual model for tropical cyclogenesis improves the representation of the important tropical transition-based subset of development events.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".