I guess that we have all noticed the amount of killer hurricanes coming up the coasts of Florida, or into the Gulf of Mexico. Right now as I writing this article (9/7/08), I am reading about Ike, the latest of these destroyers. The path it is taking might lead it into the Gulf of Mexico, or maybe not. This one could affect millions of people, because the area between Florida and the Gulf is heavily populated. The Florida Keys have had their usual evacuation warning and the storm is sending out winds of over 135 miles per hour and could get worse as it goes over the warmer land. It is said that over 80 percent of all homes on the Turks and Caicos islands were damaged by the storm. The frequency of these storms has had another effect on some people. If you think the housing market is bad for sellers in the U.S., try selling a home in an area in Florida that is constantly being hit by hurricanes. To be quite frank about this, no one wants them. Many people decided to wait until the last minute before evacuating. I guess that they are worried about leaving their homes again, but if it were me, I would be out of there with my family, in a heartbeat.

What exactly is a hurricane? It is a tropical cyclone. The term tropical cyclone refers to many different types of storms, but in reality they are the same type, such as typhoon, hurricane, tropical storm, tropical depression and others. The key here is the word tropical. They originate in tropical regions of the earth. The storm rotates as it travels and thus the term cyclone in it's name. The heat from tropical systems is frequently how the storms are born. This type of storm is in an area of low atmospheric pressure. The pressure in the center of one of these storms has set records for being the lowest on earth at sea level. If the storm is strong enough, it will develop an “eye“, this is the center of the storm and is an area of calm, where everything seems normal. Sometimes people are fooled into thinking that a hurricane has passed, when in reality they have the eye of the storm over them and there is more storm to come. When a hurricane is measured, it is measured by the distance of it's center to the outermost closed isobar. If it is less than 138 miles, it is considered tiny. The average size of a hurricane is from 207 miles to 414 miles. A storm is considered very large if the radius is greater than 552 miles.

The power for these storms is actually heat from the sun acting on water vapor in the atmosphere. Some of the other things that drive a hurricane are rotation and gravity. As the rotation gets faster and the winds blow stronger, evaporation of water vapor increases and the hurricane derives more power. For a tropical hurricane to continue to gain power and maintain itself, it must remain over warm water. When it is over land long enough, it begins to fall apart, because it has lost it's heat source. Hurricane season peaks at the end of the summer. This is because the difference between the temperature of the surface of the ocean and that of the atmosphere is the greatest. May is the least active hurricane month worldwide, while September is the busiest The North Atlantic hurricane season starts in April and ends about January. While science knows some things about hurricane and cyclone formation, they don't know everything and these storms are under intense study.

Experiments have taken place where the U.S. has attempted to dissipate hurricanes. The government established Project Stormfury. The project lasted for 21 years. Planes would be flown into the hurricanes and they would be seeded with silver iodide. The idea was that the silver iodide would freeze the water that the hurricanes needed for heat. They found out after time that there was not enough super cooled water to affect the storms. When hurricane Debbie was seeded the winds dropped, only to regain their strength. It was seeded again with the same result. Scientists have suggested other methods of dispersing these storms, one was to tow an iceberg into the storm to cool it. Another suggestion was to drop large amount of ice into the storm. Then there was Project Cirrus. Cirrus was the first attempt to modify a hurricane. It attacked a hurricane on October 13, 1947. A plane was sent into a hurricane and it dropped about 80 pounds of dry ice into it. The hurricane changed course and hit Savannah Georgia and the government was blamed for this and quickly abandoned the project.

One respected research group had predicted that 2008 would bring 14-18 tropical storms, 7-10 hurricanes and 3-6 major hurricanes. So far, since there are roughly about 3 months or more left to the hurricane season, the amount of hurricanes are running ahead of the predictions. Is hurricane frequency increasing as the earth warms? If we are talking about the world, it seems that over the 20^th century, the amount of 90 tropical storms a year has remained pretty steady. In the North Atlantic this is a clear increase in the number of these storms. From 1850 to 1990 the average number of tropical storms was about 10, this included 5 hurricanes. 1997 to 2006 saw an increase to 14 tropical storms and 8 hurricanes. As you can see this is a clear increase of 3 more hurricanes a year. There are other statistics out there that claim that the amount of Atlantic hurricanes has doubled. There is another question to also be considered and that is, will the amount of hurricanes continue to increase, making the area along both coasts of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico danger zones to live in?

We know that heat is needed to drive the hurricanes and scientists are in a furious debate over whether global warming is the cause of these hurricanes. It has been pointed out that the worldwide average for these storms is remaining the same. What does all this mean, shouldn't the amount of these storms be increasing worldwide, if global warming is the cause? It is a very tough question to answer. Some areas of the earth are getting extremely dry, while others are cold. This may all have something to do with the fact that some areas are relatively hurricane free. In case you wondered, below is a definition of the different categories of hurricanes:

Category 1: winds 74 - 95 mph
Category 2: winds 96-110 mph
Category 3: winds 111-130 mph
Category 4: winds 131-155 mph
Category 5: winds greater than 155 mph

There is definitely a link between hurricanes and climate change. The problem is whether it is natural or it has been caused by man.