Could Exoplanets Have Hurricanes? Hurricane Prediction in Exoplanet Simulations Using Earth-based Environmental Metrics

Hurricanes are well-known destructive storms common to low-latitudes on Earth, but little is known whether hurricanes may also be common to exoplanets. The potential for hurricane genesis may be characterized using key environmental metrics such as potential intensity, ventilation index, and lower-tropospheric absolute vorticity. In this project, these parameters are used to predict the locations of hurricanes by applying them to high-resolution three-dimensional climate models of tidally locked ocean-covered exoplanets with varying rotation periods of 4, 8, and 16 days. For each simulated exoplanet, the spatial distribution of simulated hurricanes are compared with the environmental measures of hurricane favorability as defined by potential intensity, ventilation index, and lower-tropospheric absolute vorticity. These comparisons for each rotation period reveal a strong agreement between the locations of the storm tracks and the environments with high hurricane genesis favorability. This suggests that Earth-based metrics may be reliable and applicable to a wide range of planetary climates. Future work analyzing the structure of the simulated storms is necessary in order to determine the extent to which they exhibit behaviors characteristic of hurricanes on Earth.