Here comes G through J

The bowling alley of hurricanes and tropical storms heading our way is in full operation: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Josophine--they're all lined up for their turn to try to wipe us off the low-lying sands of South Florida. My community is on a mountaintop at 16 feet above sea level. That's because I'm almost 20 miles inland. But some of the oldtimers here tell of rowboats and canoes rowing and paddling on Sample Road, my nearest main street only 50 feet away.

Since moving here in Coral Springs in 1998, we've experienced probably twenty named hurricanes, some of them like Wilma, Katrina, and Andrew severe, ripping out our screen room and toppling our tall ficus trees. Now we can only watch what the tracks bring us and hope to dodge the hail of bullets this month. Three years ago, the year Katrina hit New Orleans, we had so many named storms the National Weather Service ran out of alphabetical names and had to go into the Greek alphabet to name them all. Remember that? I think the last English one was Hurricane Zebulon.

Then, by late October, just as suddenly as they had formed, they were gone. Our hurricane season begins June 1 and lasts till November 30 each year. But we very seldom get any major action till late July or August. When we do, they form off Cape Verde at the African coast and drift across the tropics westward. When they get into the Caribbean, however, they try to organize themselves into waves that hang around with nowhere to go till they decide to spin up into a tropical storm or hurricane and try to head north.

The natural track of hurricanes is to circle the Atlantic Ocean basin, which in normal times is surmounted by the Bermuda High, the humongous high pressure system that is the main guiding pressure for these storms. The hurricanes try to go up off the east coast of America and circle around until they cool off and dissipate in more northern latitudes. But this arrangement is often interrupted, especially at these peak times of September into October, by low pressure troughs that come across the continent. When one of these displaces the Bermuda High, whatever storm spins under Florida gets sucked right up to the north following that trough, and voila, we get hit. Sometimes the Bermuda High expands its high pressure westward to the Gulf, and voila, Katrina, Gustav, and other storms can't curve north till they get into the Gulf head north or west to the Gulf coast.

All these patterns are very cyclical, and we've had years where hurricane after hurricane sweeps up off our Florida peninsula and smacks the Carolinas silly, one after another. Other years the most ferocious-looking systems appear to be headed straight for us, only to be blown to bits by upper-level wind shear caused by El Nino or La Nina. Every once in awhile we get a hurricane that loops around all over the place and even returns to hit somewhere again. And Fay, our most recent to hit Florida itself, made no fewer than four separate landfalls as it curved up from Key West, headed east across to the Atlantic, curved back into Jacksonville and across to the west, emerged into the Gulf again, then came ashore one last time at Tallahassee and Pensacola. The only major areas of the state Fay didn't hit were Miami and Tampa. We felt her winds here for a week.

Hurricanes and Tropical Storms are part of living in Florida. We don't take them for granted, but we realize they are part of nature and forces to be reckoned with. We prepare for them all and hope for the best. But we realize they are nature's way of transferring billions upon billions of cubic feet of warm, moist tropical air for cooler, temperate air of northern latitudes. They are nature's air conditioners/humidifiers, and the exchanges must be made to avoid cataclysmic disruption of the climate worldwide. We stand in awe of these storms and respect them. But we'd still just as soon they do their mighty work offshore and in unpopulated areas, and steer around us.