For two days Hurricane Irene pounded the coast of the Eastern United States. Though she was ultimately downgraded to a tropical storm, the damage from flooding and downed branches left no doubt as to the power she commanded: washed out roads and rail lines, flooded homes, and widespread power failures left millions trying to pick [...]

Sample a hurricane’s air from a plane high in the stratosphere and, in addition to the expected water and grit, you’ll find an abundance of microbes. Swept up from land and sea by the tropical cyclone’s power, the skyborne bacteria persist in the atmosphere for days—and some may even thrive there. A new survey of [...]

“We [seem to] have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he told President Barack Obama during his tour of the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. The remark is in the spirit of what climate scientists have been saying about the rise in “extreme weather events,” sea level [...]

Welcome to Scientific American‘s Science of Sandy live blog where we are posting continuous updates on the storm and its aftermath, and answering your questions. If you have pictures, video, audio or questions about this tropical cyclone (categorized as a hurricane and a tropical storm at various times in its progress)—share them with us at sciamsandy@gmail.com, [...]

In an eerie coincidence, Hurricane Isaac has spun up to Category 1 strength over warm Gulf waters and is predicted to hit southeastern Louisiana—and possibly New Orleans directly—seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina slammed the Crescent City. The tropical cyclone will likely be no stronger than a Category 2 on the Saffir-Simpson scale [...]

Earth’s most powerful storms—sometimes called hurricanes or typhoons but collectively known to scientists as tropical cyclones—remain dangerously unpredictable. And what’s most mysterious about tropical cyclones is what we would most like to know: how strong they are likely to become. I’m not talking about whether climate change is going to make hurricanes stronger or not [...]

As Hurricane Irene trundles toward the densely populated cities of the U.S. Northeast, residents and officials in municipalities large and small have been preparing for a full-force tropical cyclone. “All implications point to this being a historic hurricane,” President Barak Obama said in a speech Friday morning. Some 50 million people along the eastern seaboard [...]

It’s not that the central and northern portions of the east coast of North America never see hurricanes. It’s just that we in the Northeast don’t see them that often. The last one was in 1999, and the last bad one was in 1938, a deadly one that caused damage  that can still be seen [...]

This Sunday, August 29, is the fifth anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, which touched off one of the most egregious and most publicized tragedies in modern American history. Scientific American published an article in 2001 that predicted precisely the kind of destruction the storm wrought, based on computer models of hurricane [...]

Yesterday, Hurricane Irene weakened to become Tropical Storm Irene – but not before leaving at least 4 million homes without power and causing fuel shortages along the United State’s Atlantic coast. This hurricane brought on-land wind speeds of more than 85 mph in the continental United States, and maintained its hurricane status through most of [...]

Talk about eery timing. The current special issue of Scientific American is about cities, and as I type this, Hurricane Irene is making her way up the Atlantic seaboard and is expected to reach New York City by Sunday morning. I, like nearly everyone else, am refreshing news pages, blog posts, and scanning my Twitter [...]

Throughout Sandy, I was cooped up in my apartment in northern Manhattan with my son Benjamin, who was studying for a medical school exam on the cranial nerves. I drilled him through endless lists, ocularmotor nerve (cranial III),  hypoglossal (cranial XII), and so on. Then he volunteered a medical factoid that I had never heard [...]

Hurricanes are typically associated with loss of life, loss of property, and economic devastation. Hurricane Katrina, which blew through the gulf coast in summer 2005, brought all those things and more. It also brought lots of baby dolphins. Hurricanes and other major storms tend to be related to increased strandings of marine mammals, so why [...]