At the centre is a calm sunlit eye, measuring tens of kilometres across. In simple terms, hurricanes are giant machines that convert heat energy from tropical ocean water into wind. Violent winds, rain, waves, and storm tides make hurricanes one of the most dangerous natural disasters, accounting for an eighth of weather-related deaths. They have the potential to devastate the world's insurance markets. A large hurricane can stir up more than a million cubic miles of the atmosphere every second, typically dumping 15-30cm of rain on landfall.
Some hurricanes bring lots more rainfall and cause major flooding with storm surges and high surf.
As they can move rapidly and erratically, the path the winds will take is hard to predict precisely. Hurricanes also affect the depths of the ocean. In 1975, instruments dropped from research planes in the Gulf of Mexico showed that Hurricane Eloise disturbed the ocean hundreds of feet below the ocean's surface and created underwater waves that persisted for weeks. In 1962 the US government began to look at ways of how to weaken hurricanes, but the project ended without results in 1983. However, one of the world's leading hurricane scientists, Hugh Willoughby, still believes there just might be a way of disrupting hurricanes.