The link in the post Hurricane Carnot Cycle to Kerry Emanuel’s paper a Theory of Hurricanes is broken. Looking for it I came across another paper by Emanuel - TROPICAL CYCLONES it’s a very readable paper, not too much math.
From the paper:
The physics of mature storms, focusing on energy sources and sinks, are discussed in Section 3, where it is made clear that storm intensity depends sensitively on the physical nature of the air-sea interface. The problems of the physics of the air-sea transfer at very high wind speeds,
when the air is filled with sea spray, are described in Section 4, which also provides
a summary of ongoing research on this issue.
I see our friend “enthalpy” appears in the paper 21 times.
As can be seen in Figure 4, as it spirals in, it suffers a pressure drop and
its entropy increases owing to both enthalpy transfer from the sea surface (mostly
in the form of evaporation) and dissipation of kinetic energy in the atmospheric
boundary layer (Bister & Emanuel 1998).