patterns and rules in hurricanes

The most dangerous part of the storm, when it comes to a hurricane, is always going to be the eastern side. One of the reasons why is simply because a lot of these tropical storm systems, they carry the greatest amount of wind, the greatest amount of storm surge, the heaviest rainfall ... on the right side of the storm simply because of the counterclockwise rotation.

Storm surge, What happens is when you have strong winds that spin around the center of circulation from these tropical systems, the wind is so strong that it actually causes the water to pile up. The stronger the winds, theoretically, the greater the storm surge.

Say, for example, with a storm like this one, which was a Category 3 storm [it came ashore as a Category 2], you could have a storm surge that would be, say, 10 to maybe 15 feet higher than normal.

A Category 4 storm would have a storm surge that would go up to, say, 18 feet. A Category 5, the most devastating, would have a storm surge in excess of 18 feet.

Tracking, they form over open water. It's not like having a bunch of thunderstorms in the central Plains where you have radar stations all over. You have to really rely on what we refer to as remote sensing -- satellites -- and satellites can only you tell you one part [of the story]; they tell you what's happening from way high above in space.

You have to have something go in there and get some information from inside the storm. To do that, you have these C-130s, the aircraft that go out there and they drop these little things of instrumentation they refer to as dropsondes.

As they drop through parts of the hurricane, you can pick up barometric pressure, wind speeds, moisture content, stuff that's very crucial for scientists to get a good idea of when the storm is going to strengthen or weaken.

Tornadoes, they're relatively weak, of the F0 to F1 variety [on the Fujita tornado damage scale]. Very, very weak tornadoes.

They normally form in the upper right or northeast quadrant [of the storm].