A tropical storm picks up seawater and gains strength. When it makes landfall the rain is freshwater. Where does all the salt go?
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The salt did not go anywhere. That is it never left the ocean. When water evaporates the salt is left behind. Salt is produced from seawater by pumping it into large shallow ponds, the water then evaporates and the salt is left behind and is collected.
When the storm “picks up” the water, it leaves the salt behind. There was never any salt in the storm.
The storm doesn’t “pick up seawater”. It gathers water that evaporates from the sea. When water evaporates, salts and other impurities are left behind, in the sea.
The coastal plain is pretty much void of rocks that can leach minerals into the sandy soil. While I once lived in the Cape Fear region of North Carolina, hurricanes were recorded as dropping a cup of sea salt per meter of ground at UNC Wilmington. Tropical storms might drop nearly pure water as rain, but they blow tons of oceanic salt water far inland.
We lived in the region for years never noticing the plants that were all over the place until a storm blew in the nutrients they needed. Coastal elderberries need that blown in fertilizer.
I now live a bit south of Charlotte and we have the plant that goes by a number of named the indicate its coastal origins, “beach aster” “high tide bush.”
It has invaded the piedmont along salted roadways.
To follow up as others have said, the salt remains in the ocean, and it’s the reason the ocean is salty in the first place.
Think about the precipitation cycle but over billions of years. All fresh water has trace amounts of salt in it, parts per million kind of stuff. Flows into the ocean, evaporators leaving the salt behind, rains on land, picks up trace levels of salt on the land, flows into the ocean, evaporates leaving salty ocean behind, over and over and over.
Bodies of water that don’t flow into the ocean have that same effect, that’s how you get the dead sea and the great salt lake. Salt lake used to be much larger thousands of years ago, consider the Bonneville salt plains, that’s the effect of more evaporation than precipitation.
One of the problems with global warming is ice, which is fresh water, melting into the ocean and making the ocean less salty. That cause ocean currents to destabilize and exacerbate extreme changes in weather.
does pick up some non evaporated seawater, because last hurricane that hit, my high rise apartment windows were coveredddd in salt
It stays in the ocean right at the beginning. Only the water evaporates and goes into the clouds. The salt is left behind. (That’s why landlocked lakes get salty.)
Wind speed increases the evaporation rate, and the circulation of the humid air away from the surface of the water (where evaporation is occurring) also increases the evaporation rate due to presence new air ready to receive water vapor. A feedback loop that literally feeds evaporated water into the storm as the vapor condensed and falls.
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