Follow up / corollary – how do scientists therefore predict these direction changes.
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Hurricanes change directions based on steering wind flows. These winds are caused by other large scale weather factors, such as other high and low pressure areas. Take a hurricane crossing the Atlantic, for example. There is usually a ridge of high pressure over the mid-Atlantic called the “Bermuda High”. The winds flowing outward from this ridge will tend to push a hurricane away. So if the center of the high is right over the middle of the Atlantic, it will keep the storm pushed south as it crosses the ocean and smacks into the east coast of Florida. If the high is weaker or centered more to the east, the storm will reach the edge of the high and turn north instead of going to visit Miami Beach.
How are these changes predicted? We take a gigantic metric shitload of atmospheric data and feed it into very, very, very large super computers and run complex fluid dynamic algorithms on it to try to predict what the atmosphere will do. Will the ridge shift east? Will a low pressure system come down and pull the storm in a different direction? That’s what the models try to predict. But as you can see from the “cone of uncertainty” as shown in Hurricane Center forecasts, as you go forward in time, it is harder and harder to predict with accuracy. The small little errors in prediction start to build up over time.
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