Hurricanes are enormous rotating, oceanic storms with inward, spiraling winds having minimum velocities of 75 mph and a central eye. They are huge low-pressure 200-300 mile-wide circular storm systems that rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern one. Spin direction is determined by the Coriolis Effect: moving masses (even winds) veer to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern one. Right veers create counterclockwise inward spirals north of the Equator, and left veers create clockwise ones south of the Equator.

The closer to the central eye the converging spiraling winds travel, the faster they blow -- conforming to Newton's Conservation of Angular Momentum law. The fastest winds occur in the eye-wall that surrounds the clear eye, where barometric pressure is exceptionally low. Within the eye, all converged horizontal winds stop and become strong updrafts that zoom 10 miles up to the top of the Troposphere (the bottom layer of the atmosphere where all weather changes occur). The massive updrafts exit from the eye as down from the overlying stratosphere. The extremely dry stratospheric air then evaporates all moisture within the eye, leaving it cloudless and clear.

Hurricanes that affect America begin as weak tropical depressions (low pressure systems) in the eastern Atlantic that grow in size and strength as they are blown westward by the trade winds. Equatorial water temperatures increase from east to west, which enables tropical depressions to evaporate warmer surface waters and to gradually enlarge into tropical storms as they gain more vapor while moving westward. On reaching 80°F water temperatures, tropical storms can pick up enough vapor to form an eye and to increase wind velocity to 75 mph, which is minimal for category 1 hurricanes. Category 2, 3, 4 and 5 minimal wind velocities are 95, 110, 130 and 155 mph respectively. Hurricane wind velocities increase as they spiral inward towards the central eye. Newton's law, Úquot;Conservation of Angular Momentum,Úquot; stipulates that rotating masses (even if gaseous) increase their velocity as they get closer to the point or mass about which they are moving.

After reaching the Caribbean, hurricanes usually swing around and head northeastward across the Atlantic toward the Arctic. There they weaken and break up as cold water decreases evaporation and deprives hurricanes of the vast volumes of vapor required for condensation to provide the huge amounts of latent heat needed to keep them going. From the Caribbean, hurricanes may also swing into Florida or Georgia to wreak havoc in land areas; or they may move westward or northwestward into the Gulf to attack Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama.

Long Island, which sticks out from the East Coast like a sore thumb, gets clobbered by hurricanes that track northeastward parallel with the coast until they run into us.

Besides the Atlantic, hurricanes occur in other oceans where they usually have different names. In the western Pacific, they are still called hurricanes. In the northeastern Pacific, they're called typhoons, and in the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific near Australia, they're known as cyclones - which name unfortunately is used for large innocuous low-pressure systems that cross North America almost daily.