Introduction

Abstract

Conceived over warm tropical oceans, born amid torrential thundershowers, and nurtured by water vapor drawn inward from far away, the mature tropical cyclone is an offspring of the atmosphere with both negative and positive consequences for life. Severe cyclones are among the most destructive of all natural disasters, capable of annihilating coastal towns and killing hundreds of thousands of people. On the positive though less dramatic side, they provide essential rainfall over much of the lands they cross. Smaller than extratropical cyclones which are spawned by and follow the perturbations in the westerly flow in middle latitudes, hurricanes are associated with violent winds near the center (by definition at least 32 m s⁻¹ or 115 km h⁻¹) and copious rainfall amounts. The highest sustained (1 min average) winds ever recorded were 88 m s⁻¹ (317 km h⁻¹) in Hurricane Inez of 1966 (Colon, 1966). Maximum gusts have exceeded 100 m s⁻¹ (360 km h⁻¹). In most storms, however, the maximum sustained wind speed is approximately 50 m s⁻¹ (180 km h⁻¹).