Tracking Hurricanes

• Category 3 – winds of 111-129 miles per hour. This is a major hurricane with much damage to homes and roof decks, trees, and power lines with power losses for many weeks afterward.

• Category 4 – winds of 130-156 miles per hour. Expect catastrophic damage with wall and roof damage to homes, most trees lost, and downed power lines so that power outages could last up to many months.

• Category 5 – winds of 157 or more miles per hour. Expect catastrophic damage with most homes destroyed or collapsed. The area will be uninhabitable for up to several months.

With each category level, the risk of damage increases by fourfold. Even the mildest category one storms can cause significant damage, depending on where the hurricane lands and how fast it strikes. Damage comes from the storm surge, wind, hail, and rain. Larger storms will have greater degrees of storm surging. More winds also mean a greater storm surge too.

TRACKING HURRICANES

Hurricane models are used to track hurricanes. We now use supercomputers that get fed information and that also use historical records on prior hurricane behavior to determine the movement of a hurricane. In general, the longer a hurricane spends over water, the stronger it gets. Over land, however, and they lose strength, beginning to dissipate.

There are some things you want to track about a hurricane as you follow its progress over time. The path you predict will not be perfect but will be a "best guess" based on the information you receive from dynamical and statistical information. You would use these terms to describe a hurricane's behavior:

• Best track – this is your subjective best guess as to the hurricane's lifetime as indicated by where you expect it to be every six hours as it travels. It doesn’t reflect the fact that a storm can be erratic and unpredictable.