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20 Things You Did Not Know About Hurricanes

“A typical hurricane releases some 600 trillion watts of heat


energy, equivalent to 200 times the world’s total electrical
generating capacity.”
From Jocelyn Rice, Discover Magazine, 20 things you didn’t know
about hurricanes:

1 Our word for these storms comes from Hurakán, a one-legged


Mayan deity who summoned the Great Flood from his perch in
the windy mists.
2 The Mayans built their major cities inland away from flooding,
showing a better understanding of Hurakán’s rages than the
engineers who designed the New Orleans waterfront.
3 In 1609 a group of English settlers en route to Virginia were
struck by a hurricane and washed ashore at Bermuda—an event
that reportedly helped inspire Shakespeare’s Tempest.
4 Hurricanes laid waste to so many powerful armadas that, during
the Spanish-American War, President McKinley declared that he
feared the storms more than the Spanish navy. In response he
established a network of storm-warning stations, the forerunner of
today’s National Hurricane Center.
5 During World War II, a British flying instructor, Colonel Joe
Duckworth, bet his pilots he could fly straight into a hurricane.
Amazingly, he succeeded.
6 Hurricane forecasts today rely on Air Force pilots who zigzag
through the eye, releasing dropsondes—parachute-equipped
tubes containing instruments that measure pressure, temperature,
humidity, and wind speed.
7 In North America we call them hurricanes, but in the western
Pacific the same storms are known as typhoons. To avoid a
tedious argument, meteorologists call them all tropical cyclones.
8 Due to the earth’s rotation, hurricanes spin counterclockwise
north of the equator and clockwise south of it.
9 And once and for all: No, your flushing toilet does not do the
same thing.
10 Most Atlantic hurricanes are born off the western coast of
Africa, where warm water and a cool, windy upper atmosphere
conspire to create a spiraling storm.
11 Activity peaks this month, when ocean-surface waters are
warmest. Nearly half of all tropical cyclones occur in September.
12 We’re going to need a bigger windmill: A typical hurricane
releases some 600 trillion watts of heat energy, equivalent to 200
times the world’s total electrical generating capacity.
13 Hurricanes unleash torrential rains, violent thunderstorms, and
even tornadoes. But their deadliest component by far is the storm
surge, the chunk of ocean pushed ashore by winds that can gust
up to 200 miles per hour.
14 In 1970 a 30-foot storm surge claimed at least 300,000 lives in
East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
15 The horrific event inspired the Concert for Bangladesh, the first
major rock benefit concert. But most of the proceeds were
impounded by the IRS until years later.
16 The largest known tropical cyclone was 1979’s typhoon Tip,
which stretched 1,400 miles across the northwestern Pacific—the
distance from Dallas to Washington, D.C.
17 That’s still nothing compared with Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a
seemingly eternal 400-mile-per-hour hurricane nearly twice the
size of our entire planet.
18 The World Meteorological Organization started naming
hurricanes in 1953. Now the organization moves through an
alphabetical list of names on a six-year rotation, retiring hall-of-
famer storm names like “Katrina” each season.
19 Want a storm to call your own? Bad news: The National
Hurricane Center already has “a rather large file folder of
nominated names.”
20 And be careful what you wish for. After “Cleo” was retired in
1964, a researcher at the center filled the slot with “Camille,” in
honor of the daughter of famed hurricane forecaster John Hope.
Five years later, hurricane Camille hit the Mississippi coast, killing
250.

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