Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. Scientists don’t know exactly why or how a hurricane forms. But they do know that you need two main ingredients: warm waters and winds that do not vary too much in direction and speed.
We call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur. Tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or the eastern Pacific Ocean are what we know as “hurricanes.”
These huge, torrential storms can produce winds of 119 kilometers per hour or even more, making it faster than the cheetah itself, the fastest animal on the face of the earth. Their ferocity is such that hurricane winds can cause tremendous damage to buildings or trees.
The natural engine of a hurricane is powered by hot, humid air. Storms carry heat from the ocean’s surface into the Earth’s atmosphere, and can travel thousands of kilometers from the tropics to Earth’s poles. When a hurricane forms, meteorological scientists predict its path and characteristics.
There are five types or categories of hurricanes -based on wind speed-, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale:
Category 1 hurricanes: 119-153 km / h winds (faster than a cheetah)
Category 2 hurricanes: Winds of 154-177 km / h (as fast or faster than a pitcher’s fastball in baseball)
Category 3 hurricanes: Winds of 178-208 km / h (similar to the service speed of many professional tennis players)
Category 4 hurricanes: Winds of 209-251 km / h (faster than the fastest roller coaster in the world)
Category 5 hurricanes: Winds of more than 252 km / h (similar to the speed of some high-speed trains).
What we call the ‘eye’ of the hurricane is the ‘hole’ in the center of the storm, where the winds blow light in this area and the sky can be partly cloudy or even clear.
Each year, tropical storms are named in alphabetical order. There are six lists of names and these lists are reused every six years. If a storm does devastating damage, your name can be removed from the list and replaced with a new name that begins with the same letter.
NOAA ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ) controls two GOES ( Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite ) satellites that keep their eyes on hurricanes from far away from the Earth’s surface, more than 35,800 kilometers, in order to monitor, report and prevent to the earth.
