ocean by the wind. Finally, when it moves over land or cold water, it loses its fuel source (warm ocean) and dies. Hurricanes are extremely large, sometimes well over 400 miles in diameter. The winds that spiral in toward the eye can reach up to 75 miles an hour, while at the eye the sky is clear and the air is calm. Hurricanes are very erratic in nature and therefore it is extremely hard to predict their paths. Perhaps the greatest modern-day example of the behaviour of hurricanes is Hurricane Elena3. Elena was born off the western coast of Africa on August 22, 1985 and only classified as a tropical disturbance, which means that the winds are moving less than 20 miles per hour. It rapidly moved across the Atlantic in less than a week, and by the time it reached Cuba it was a tropical storm, the winds moving over 60 miles per hour. Two days later, on August 29, Elena was upgraded to hurricane status, with winds exceeding 130 miles per hour. Meteorologists were stunned by Elena's unpredictability. Let's see if you can forecast her path of destruction. (see exercise 1)It goes without saying that hurricanes hold a lot of energy. It is estimated that if all the latent heat released during a hurricane of average size could be harnessed for use, it could supply the entire United States with enough electricity for six months.4 Oddly enough, the damage from hurricanes rarely comes from the millions of gallons of rain that they release. Flood waters from huge waves and the consequential flooding, along with the high winds that ravage the landscape, cause one hundred times more damage than the rain. And in the bayou region of Louisiana, residents are more concerned with poisonous snakes that wash up and nest in crevices and holes, and then come out after the storm disoriented and violent, than the water and wind.Mytych 4Before we look at our final topic, we need to look at how hurricanes are named. In the late nineteenth centu...
