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Wind
Solar radiation warms air, land and sea, but it does not do so evenly. The equator receives more sunshine than the poles. As warm air rises near the equator, it flows north and south, and cold air flowing beneath it takes its place. The Earth's rotation causes these wind currents to become skewed with respect to Earth's surface -- a phenomenon called the Coriolis effect. This large-scale circulation gives rise to wind patterns like the trade winds and surface ocean currents.
Evaporation
Perhaps when you were a child you've watched water condense on the outside of a cool glass, warming the glass in the process. You may not have realized it, but you were watching the same process that powers the mighty engine of a hurricane. These tropical storms form in low-pressure centers over warm tropical waters, where the ocean has absorbed a substantial amount of heat from the sun. Water has a high latent heat of vaporization, so a lot of energy is needed to vaporize it, and the evaporation of large quantities of ocean water is in effect storing solar energy.
Condensation
As a mass of warm, humid tropical air rises, it cools rapidly and is unable to hold all the moisture it absorbed through evaporation. As the water vapor condenses to form rain, it releases heat energy through condensation -- the same energy that was essentially "stored" through evaporation. Some of this heat energy is converted into air motion or wind; still more contributes to driving updrafts that lead to still more condensation. A large hurricane can generate some 2.4 trillion kilowatt-hours a day, roughly about the same amount of power that the United States uses in a year, and deposit as much as 20 billion metric tons of rainfall in a single day.
Demise
The trade winds and large-scale wind circulation patterns driven by solar energy propel these giant storm engines away from their origin and across the ocean's surface. As long as the hurricane travels across warm tropical waters, it can continue to draw energy from the same process; warm humid air spirals in towards the hurricane's center, laden with moisture which rapidly condenses, releasing still more heat energy. When it reaches cooler waters or land, however, it rapidly loses strength -- although it often causes massive damage to coastal or island communities in the process.