Hurricane Power
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When you've got hurricanes pestering you every year, why not make the best of it? The Bahamas is giving the idea a good try.
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| Hurricane, Bahamas 1898-99 Winslow Homer |
The island nation that's just east of Florida is definitely hurricane country. It has some of the warmest waters of the entire Atlantic. That makes it a friendly place for beachgoers as well as for tropical cyclones. But the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism wants people to know the whole story. The nation is now calling itself "The Islands of the Bahamas," and in fact it includes over 700 islands spread over an area half the size of Texas. This makes it hard for a single hurricane to threaten the whole country in one pass.
When a hurricane does strike, the Bahama Hotel Association promises a full refund for any storm-related cancellations. And instead of telling hurricane experts to leave them alone, the Bahamas invites them to visit. This year they held their fifth annual Weather Conference. It attracted some of the top U.S. leaders in forecasting, research, and emergency management. It also lured almost 100 TV weather people, who learned more about hurricanes and about the Bahamas themselves. The idea was to help weathercasters refer to the various island groups more accurately the next time a hurricane threatens. If a weather warning can serve as a geography lesson, than the Bahamas have an unbeatable edge--and a delightful climate, as long as the hurricanes stay away.
Thanks today to writer Bob Henson who lives in Boulder, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is undewritten by the National Science Foundation. Wanna go to the Bahamas and learn more about hurricanes there? Ride a gust over to our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks also go today to producer Margaret Landsman and executive engineer Sean Doucette.
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