ABSTRACT
One of the usual features of a phase change is a transition temperature. The literature on hurricanes has long recognized that hurricanes do not form when the sea surface temperature is below 26.5 °C. A recent careful compendium of hurricane formation temperatures is that of Dare and McBride. The theory of the second-order phase transitions finds that phases of matter are organized in universality classes that share identical critical exponents in spite of wide dissimilarity. For example, it is known that the magnetization vs temperature of uniaxial antiferromagnets, such as Dy AlO3, shares precisely its critical exponent with that of the liquid-vapor transition of simple fluids. People assert that the hurricane phase is in the Ising universality class, first, because the critical exponent is correct for that assignment. Further, the nature of the hurricane phase is a vertically directed angular momentum, generated by the azimuthal wind flow.
