|
|
|
|
S. A. Hurricane
Fri Aug 06, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Hurricanes may cause incredible
havoc, but at least they usually know where they belong. The world has a handful of
well-marked hurricane zones, where people know a landfall is possible in any given
year.
The South Atlantic, though, has always been considered hurricane-free. Its waters
aren’t very warm, and upper-level winds tend to pull cyclones apart. But a funny thing
happened this year. In late March a tropical cyclone formed in the South Atlantic. After
several days it had all the satellite earmarks of a full-fledged hurricane.
The problem was what to do with it. Nobody had ever observed a hurricane in the
South Atlantic before. This poor storm didn’t even have a name since no one keeps an
official list for this area. But the nameless storm kept right on chugging toward the
coast of Brazil. Some forecasters claimed it wasn’t a hurricane at all. America's
National Hurricane Center insisted it was.
By sheer luck, a Civil Defense employee in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina had
just attended a training course that included hurricanes. The state’s weather office
used radio and the Internet to let people know about this unprecedented threat. And
the precautions paid off. Although some 40,000 homes were damaged, and 1,500
were destroyed, as winds topped 100 miles an hour. Yet only one person died on
land, with a few more missing at sea.
No one knows if the storm dubbed "Hurricane Catarina" was just a fluke or the start of
a trend. But Catarina may have invalidated much of the research explaining why
hurricanes never form in the South Atlantic . . . because she did.
The Weather Notebook is produced with funding from the National Science
Foundation, and Subaru of America. We are a program of the Mount Washington
Observatory.
|
|
