andrew

Andrew was a small and ferocious Cape Verde hurricane that wrought unprecedented economic devastation along a path through the northwestern Bahamas, the southern Florida peninsula, and south-central Louisiana. Damage in the United States is estimated to be near 25 billion, making Andrew the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history1. The tropical cyclone struck southern Dade County, Florida, especially hard, with violent winds and storm surges characteristic of a category 4 hurricane on the Saffir/Simpson …

…an area of high pressure. The wave passed to the south of the Cape Verde Islands on the following day. At that point, meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center (NHC) Tropical Satellite Analysis and Forecast (TSAF) unit and the Synoptic Analysis Branch (SAB) of the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) found the wave sufficiently well-organized to begin classifying the intensity of the system using the Dvorak (1984) analysis technique. Bibliography www.fermi.com