In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew roared through the Caribbean as a near-worst-case Category 4 storm, with high winds that devastated Haiti and other countries. But when it made landfall in the United States a few days later, Matthew limped into South Carolina as a Category 1, bringing torrential rains and flooding but little else.
That storm was a prime example of what a new study suggests is a remarkable feature regarding Atlantic hurricanes and their impact: When climatic conditions favor a lot of hurricane activity, they also create a buffer zone that weakens the storms as they approach the coastal United States.
“It’s an incredibly lucky phenomenon”, said James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the author of the study, published in Nature, which looked at hurricane data from 1947 to 2015. “It’s given us a really nice barrier and decreased our threats”. (1)
How heartbreakingly sad.
Nature is always in Balance…
And yet we always see chance, luck and randomness everywhere…
Try to make people get out of the cave…
And they will laugh at you…
It is cozy there.
