A hurricane is a gigantic spinning storm that forms over warm tropical ocean water. Warm water is its fuel: the sun heats the sea, water evaporates and rises, and the storm starts to spin because of Earth's rotation. In the middle is a calm, clear hole called the eye, surrounded by the eyewall — where the wildest winds of all are found.
The same storm has different names in different places: in the Atlantic it's a hurricane, in the western Pacific it's a typhoon, and in the Indian Ocean it's a cyclone. They are all the same kind of storm! Scientists rate their strength from Category 1 (weakest) to Category 5 (strongest).
Hurricane Florence photographed from the International Space Station in 2018. Look at the clear round eye in the middle — the calmest part of the storm! See source ↓
💨 How fast is the wind?
To be called a hurricane, a storm needs winds of at least 119 kilometres per hour — faster than cars drive on the motorway! The strongest hurricanes can have winds over 250 kilometres per hour, fast enough to rip roofs off houses and snap trees.
📜 A bit of history
Hurricanes get people's names so that weather forecasters can talk about them easily. Before names, they were tracked by numbers, which got confusing when two storms spun at once! If a hurricane is especially terrible, its name is retired forever — like Katrina in 2005.
📚 Picture Sources
- Photo 1 — Hurricane Florence from the International Space Station, 2018 (NASA photo, public domain). From Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Staring_Down_Hurricane_Florence.jpg
