Home / Editor's Pick /

Hurricane season: potential risks

07:00 PM
June 1, 2022

It's not just the wind
Hurricane season: potential risks

Hurricane

It's officially the start of Atlantic Hurricane Season and hurricanes pose more risks than just damaging winds. Residents and visitors of the coasts should be prepared for the many other hazards hurricanes bring.

Tornadoes

Hurricanes and tropical storms produce rain bands that spiral outward from the center of the storm. Sometimes, turbulence and rotating air in the rain bands can favor tornado-producing storms. While tornadoes embedded within hurricanes are usually weak and short-lived, they are challenging to predict and cause extensive damage.

Tornadoes are most frequent in the leading right quadrant of the storm, where conditions are often most favorable for rotating air.

Erosion

When dealing with a landfalling hurricane (or one coming close to the shore), beaches are a natural buffer between the ocean and inland communities, ecosystems, and natural resources.

Seawater will inevitably begin to eat away at loose sand, soils, or rocks, putting at-risk infrastructure adjacent to the coast. As a result, beaches are stripped of their sand, asphalt along roads crack, and homes could lose their foundations.

A paper published in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters studied the erosion impact Hurricane Maria had on 75 beaches across Puerto Rico in 2017. The results found at Maria caused erosion of 9 to 15 meters along its path, up to 120 feet at beaches. That's roughly the length of an Olympic-sized swimming pool!

Storm surge

When a cyclone makes landfall, seawater can push several miles inland, worsening erosion and flooding communities adjacent to the coast, sometimes several dozen feet deep. Storm surge is the abnormal rise in water generated by a storm above the forecast astronomical tide.

If the cyclone is exceptionally expansive or powerful, storm surge can often go far beyond the coast. For example, Hurricane Ike carried a storm surge more than 28 miles inland from the coast of Texas and Louisiana. As mentioned before, no storm can be treated alike—how far or high storm surge can get will depend on the terrain, coastline, and storm trajectory.

Flooding

Excessive rain can affect cities well away from the coast. There are times when a storm can slow down and its rains fall over a region intensively, causing flooding and catastrophic impacts. A hurricane’s remnants also cause big flooding risks, even far inland.

Weather & Radar USA editorial team
Irene Sans
Becca Parker
More on the topic
rip current
Monday, May 26, 2025

As more head to the coast

Rip currents & safety tips
Derecho iowa
Sunday, June 22, 2025

Stay severe weather-aware

What are derechos?
Happy Earth Day
Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Employ renewable energy

Earth Day 2025 - Our Power, Our Planet
All weather news
This might also interest you
Sunday, July 6, 2025

At least 45 dead

Catastrophic flooding in central Texas
Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Chantal's remnants

Tropical waterspout in North Carolina
Sunday, July 6, 2025

Tropical Storm Chantal

Carolina's heavy rains, flood risk
All articles
Weather & Radar

www.weatherandradar.com

instagramfacebookthreadsContact uslinkList
Privacy policy | Legal info | Accessibility statement