ABSTRACT
“Critical aspects” of rainfall and hurricanes are those aspects related to a second-order phase transition. Broadly speaking, a “phase” is a general organization of matter, for example as a solid or a liquid. “Critical phenomena” have been intensely studied only more recently with the discovery of subtle mathematical relationships leading to the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1982 to Kenneth G. Wilson. The overlap of this field with meteorology has been limited to the discovery of critical aspects of rainfall and Wolf’s discovery regarding hurricanes. The familiar transitions between solid, liquid, and gas phases of matter are the first-order transitions, with discontinuous changes in properties such as density at the transition temperature, and requiring a latent heat for the transition to occur. Ferromagnetism is perhaps the most familiar example of a continuous phase transition. Hurricanes are unrelated to magnetism but in the same “universality class”.
