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If such a big cyclone gets followed by high pressure and then another cyclone, things might really start to look like Mike Tyson in his prime.
You mean beaten? Or biting? =)
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I imagine rain is far better , and faster, at melting ice than sunshine?
I think if you have 2 blocks of ice , one sat in water in shade but under a constant shower of water and one sat in water in full sun the heat transfer from the constant rain would be greater than the sunshine?
Depends on how much rain it is. It takes LOTS of energy to make the solid-to-liquid transition, - basically same amount of energy per gram as it takes to increase temperature of that gram of water from 0C to 83C. So, let's say rain water comes in at some 5C temperature; then to melt roughly 1 cm of ice thickness, we'd need roughly 16 cm layer of water from such "+5C" rain water to fall. 1 meter of thickness = 16 meters of rainfall. The latter's quite unrealistic, don't you think.
It is not rainfall directly which spells doom for ice; it's related effects which the cyclone produces.
1st, winds cause wave action, steering water column of the ocean - and there is HUGE amount of heat, in most places, stored in that "mixable by strong cyclone" 100 meters water column. Easily enough to melt a meter of ice on the surface.
2nd, rain creates ponds and destroys any remaining snow cover easily, and so after cyclone is gone, much reduced albedo of ponded ice allows sun to melt things times faster.
3rd, whereever ice is in much broken shape already, waves will break it further into smaller pieces, thus increasing total surface of water-ice boundary - and summer-time this can only mean faster melt whenever any warm wind and/or more rain and/or more sunshine and/or warm water current would come next.