Hurricane season: potential risks

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.