50 Fun Facts About Hurricanes Trivia for Kids

Over which kind of surface do hurricanes form and gather their energy?

Warm ocean water. The sea surface needs to be about 27°C (around 80°F) so that enough water evaporates to feed the growing storm with heat and moisture.

Which way do hurricane winds spin in the Northern Hemisphere?

Counterclockwise. Air rushing toward the storm's low-pressure centre is turned by the Earth's rotation, so it spirals inward instead of flowing straight in.

Hurricanes quickly lose their strength once they move over what?

Land cuts a hurricane off from its fuel supply, and friction with the ground slows its winds, so most storms break up within a few days of coming ashore.

Where in a hurricane are the very strongest winds found?

In the eyewall, a ring of towering thunderstorms where inflowing air is flung upward, so a hurricane's fiercest winds blow right beside its quietest spot.

Roughly how wide is a typical hurricane eye?

30 to 65 kilometres. Air sinks in the middle of the storm, which keeps the eye mostly free of cloud with light winds.

A hurricane that forms in the northwestern Pacific Ocean is called what?

A typhoon is the same kind of storm as a hurricane, so when Hurricane Genevieve crossed the International Date Line in 2014 it simply became Typhoon Genevieve.

Hurricanes coming ashore in the United States often spawn which other kind of storm?

Tornadoes. A hurricane's broad spin and the shifting winds at its edges can twist its thunderstorms into twisters as the storm comes ashore.

A storm officially becomes a hurricane when its winds reach at least how fast?

74 miles per hour. Below that it is a tropical storm, which gets a name once it reaches 39 mph because short names cause fewer mix-ups than map coordinates.

What is the top number on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale?

5. The top step has no upper limit, so every hurricane with winds of 157 mph or more counts as Category 5, which is why some scientists have proposed adding a Category 6.

What was the job of Herbert Saffir, who built the hurricane scale around wind damage to buildings?

Engineer. Herbert Saffir was studying how windstorms wreck low-cost housing for the United Nations, so he ranked hurricanes by the damage their winds do to buildings.

Which alert means hurricane-force winds are expected in an area, not just possible?

A hurricane warning goes out 36 hours before the first strong winds are due, because getting ready becomes too dangerous once they arrive; a watch means only that a hurricane is possible.

When does the Atlantic hurricane season officially run?

June 1 to November 30. Those six months were chosen because they take in more than 97 percent of Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes, yet a few still form outside them.

In which month does the Atlantic hurricane season reach its peak?

September. By then the tropical Atlantic has warmed through a whole summer of sun and the winds that tear young storms apart are at their weakest; the statistical peak day is September 10.

Which letters are skipped when naming Atlantic hurricanes?

Q, U, X, Y and Z are skipped because too few names begin with those letters, which leaves 21 names on each year's Atlantic list.

Clement Wragge, credited as the first to name storms after people, sometimes picked which group he disliked?

Politicians. Naming a storm after one let Wragge report him as 'causing great distress' or 'wandering aimlessly about the Pacific'.

Why is a hurricane's name sometimes 'retired' and never used again?

It caused terrible deaths or damage, so reusing the name would be insensitive: an international committee strikes it from the list and picks a replacement starting with the same letter.

The San Felipe hurricanes took Saint Philip's name because they struck on what?

His feast day. Two hurricanes struck the same island on September 13, 52 years apart, so the second, in 1928, is remembered as San Felipe Segundo.

Until 2020, which alphabet supplied extra names when the Atlantic ran through its list of storm names?

The Greek alphabet was needed only in 2005 and 2020, and it was dropped after Zeta, Eta and Theta sounded too alike in warnings; a list of spare names now stands by instead.

Which US city is home to the National Hurricane Center?

Miami. The Weather Bureau moved its Jacksonville hurricane warning office there in 1943, the office that grew into the National Hurricane Center.

What do the 'Hurricane Hunters' do?

Fly airplanes into storms to gather data. In 1943 the pilot Joseph Duckworth flew a small training plane into a hurricane off Texas, proving that it could be done.

From 1953 until 1979, Atlantic hurricanes were given only which kind of names?

Women's names. US forecasters adopted them in 1953 in place of the phonetic code names Able, Baker and Charlie, and men's names joined the Atlantic lists in 1979.

A storm surge is a dangerous rise in what?

Sea level along the coast rises because onshore winds pile ocean water against the shore, and the surge is counted separately from the waves that ride on top of it.

Why do hurricanes almost never form right on the equator?

Too little Coriolis force to spin them. The turning Earth's sideways push on moving air shrinks to zero at the equator, so a storm must be about 300 miles away to start rotating.

About how many named tropical cyclones form around the world each year?

80 to 90. That works out to a new named storm somewhere in the world about every four days, and about half of them grow to hurricane strength.

Which ocean almost never has tropical cyclones because of strong wind shear?

The South Atlantic gets so few storms that when a hurricane formed there in March 2004 and struck Brazil, it had no official name and became known unofficially as Catarina.

Tip, the largest tropical cyclone ever measured, formed over which ocean in 1979?

The Pacific Ocean. Tip stretched about 2,220 kilometres across, nearly half the size of the contiguous United States, yet it had weakened by the time it reached Japan a week after its peak.

Hurricane Patricia, whose 215 mph winds in 2015 are the strongest ever measured, came ashore in which country?

Mexico. Patricia weakened fast in its last hours at sea and came ashore on a sparsely populated stretch of coast, which kept the toll from the strongest hurricane ever measured far lower than it might have been.

Which 2012 storm is the widest Atlantic hurricane on record, with winds spanning roughly 1,000 miles?

Sandy came ashore in New Jersey as a post-tropical storm, no longer officially a hurricane, yet its vast wind field pushed record storm tides into New York Harbor.

How wide was the smallest hurricane eye ever measured, seen inside Hurricane Wilma in 2005?

2.3 miles. As Wilma's eye tightened to that pinhole, its central pressure plunged to 882 millibars, the lowest ever measured in an Atlantic hurricane.

Which director was on location when Hurricane Iniki struck in 1992 and used footage of the storm in his film?

Steven Spielberg and his Jurassic Park crew sheltered in their hotel on the last scheduled day of the location shoot, and his shots of the storm's waves went into the movie.

Which state did Hurricane Iniki hit, the most powerful hurricane in its recorded history?

Hawaii. Iniki crossed the island of Kauai in 1992, destroying more than 1,400 homes and wrecking the grid so badly that only a fifth of the power supply was back four weeks later.

Which US city was 80 percent flooded by Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

New Orleans flooded when Katrina's storm surge overtopped or broke through the levees and floodwalls built to protect it, letting lake and canal water pour into the city.

Hurricane Harvey in 2017 caused huge damage mainly through what?

Rainfall flooding. Harvey stalled near the Texas coast for days and dropped about 60 inches of rain near the town of Nederland, the wettest storm on record in the United States.

A hurricane called a 'Cape Verde hurricane' gets its start near islands off which continent?

Africa. Cape Verde hurricanes grow from ripples of low pressure that roll off the African coast, and the long run across the open Atlantic gives them time to become some of the season's biggest storms.

When two hurricanes get close and start circling each other, what is that called?

The Fujiwhara effect sends two nearby storms dancing around a common centre, and a much stronger one can pull the weaker in and absorb it; Sakuhei Fujiwhara described it in 1921.

'Rapid intensification' means a storm's winds increase by at least 35 mph in how long?

24 hours. Jumps like that leave people little time to prepare: in 2015 Hurricane Patricia's winds rose by about 120 mph in a single day.

In 1960 TIROS-1 became the first successful what?

Weather satellite. TIROS-1 was built to test whether TV pictures of clouds taken from orbit could help forecasters; a power failure ended its work after about two and a half months, but the idea stuck.

In 1961 Dan Rather showed TV viewers Hurricane Carla's size on which weather-office display?

Radar screen. Rather had the Gulf coastline traced on clear plastic and held it over the radar picture so viewers could see how huge Carla was, and the broadcast won him a job at CBS News.

Through 2025, Hurricane Beryl of 2024 was one of only two Atlantic storms to reach the top category in which month?

July. Beryl reached the top category on July 2, 2024, the earliest date on record, over water that was near record warmth for early summer; the only other July storm to do it was Emily in 2005.

Which 2019 hurricane hit the Bahamas with 185 mph winds, tying the Atlantic landfall record?

Dorian then sat nearly still over Grand Bahama for about a day, which is why it became the worst natural disaster in the Bahamas' recorded history.

Which 1992 hurricane was the last top-category storm to hit the mainland US before Michael?

Andrew was rated Category 4 for ten years until a 2002 re-analysis raised it to the top category, and Michael got the same upgrade six months after it struck in 2018.

On a hurricane forecast map, the 'cone of uncertainty' shows the likely path of what?

The storm's centre. The cone says nothing about how wide a hurricane is, and it is drawn so that the centre itself stays inside only about two-thirds of the time.

Storms rated Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale get what special label?

Major. The label starts at 111 mph because winds that strong cause devastating damage: major hurricanes are a minority of the storms that hit the United States but do most of the harm.

Since records began in 1851, which US state has been hit by the most hurricanes?

Florida. Its long coastline faces both the Atlantic and the Gulf, and about 40 percent of all the hurricanes that have struck the United States have hit it.

The deadliest hurricane in US history struck which Texas city in 1900?

Galveston. After the storm killed thousands, the city built a seawall 17 feet high and pumped in sand to raise whole neighbourhoods, jacking up more than 2,000 buildings to do it.

How high above the ground are hurricane winds measured for the Saffir-Simpson scale?

33 feet (10 metres). That is the worldwide standard height for wind gauges, set well clear of the ground because friction with the surface slows and tangles the air lower down.

The word 'hurricane' came into English from which language?

Spanish. Explorers in the Caribbean picked up 'huracán' from the Taíno people of the islands, and English borrowed it from them in the 1550s.

A steadily falling reading on which instrument warns that a hurricane is closing in?

A barometer. Air pressure keeps dropping as a hurricane nears and bottoms out in the middle of the storm, so forecasters use that lowest reading as a measure of how strong it is.

Maps showing many computer forecasts of one hurricane's path are nicknamed after which food?

Spaghetti. Each strand is one computer model's forecast of the storm's track, so a tight bundle tells forecasters the models agree, while strands that splay apart warn that the outlook is still uncertain.

Hurricane Maria cut power to nearly all 3.4 million people of which US island territory in 2017?

Puerto Rico. Maria wrecked the island's power grid so completely that nearly half its residents were still without electricity three months later, at the end of 2017.