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The anatomy of a hurricane

A hurricane is a very violent and destructive wind, with a whirling motion occurring in our atmosphere and causing winds reaching the highest speeds on our planet, together with those blowing in the Antarctica.

The word "hurricane" doesn't indicate all the storms of this type occurring in the world but only those of the Mexican Gulf and the Pacific coasts of Central America, hitting the seas, the islands and the coasts of this whole tropical area. Its name derives from "huracanes", in the language of the Natives of Central America.

Along the coasts of Asia, their name is "typhoons" (from the Chinese "t'ai fung", meaning "violent wind"), while the air storms forming in the wide planes of North America and Australia are named "tornados" (from the Spanish "torno", meaning "whirl" or "circle") but, in all these cases, the atmospheric phenomenon is the same.

All typhoons and hurricanes are traditionally named with male of female names, maybe to underscore that each one is never equal to the previous, as it had its own personality.

Tropical seas are the hottest seas, with an intense evaporation that forms masses of hot water vapour going upward in the atmosphere, together with the hotter air at the contact with sea water (warmer than the earth).
This movement upward attracts other hot air from downward and it can easily become whirling, until forming a long, nearly vertical eddy, from the sea level until various Km of height, due to the condensation of the hot moisture in the upper atmosphere. In this long eddy, the winds move very fast around its centre, the so called "eye" of the hurricane, that can have a diameter of some tens of Km, in the largest hurricanes. These can reach a average total diameter of 1000 Km, with enormous masses of clouds and air rotating in a spiral movement around the eye.

In the eye, the pressure can drop to 960-950 millibars (against the normal 1020-1030 millibars) and this depression takes in wet and hot sir from the ocean surface to enforce and widen the eddy around the eye.
Strangely, just in the eye (with a diameter from some hundred metres to some tens of Km), all is calm and it's even possible to see the blue sky, looking upward, while the hell is unchaining all around.

The hurricanes move themselves, normally, from S-E to N-W and start in the Medium Atlantic Ocean or in the southern Antillean Sea from June to November. So, they move toward Cuba, Yucatan and the southern and eastern coasts of the U.S.; they are pushed forward by the tropical


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The anatomy of a hurricane

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