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Family Travel Forum's guide to answering your kid's questions about these scary storms that come with familiar names.

Typically over 300 miles wide and possessing winds that extend for hundreds of miles more, hurricanes are the most powerful and destructive of all meteorological phenomena. In the past century they were responsible for over 15,000 deaths in the United States alone. Even today, despite the aid of highly advanced tracking systems and warning procedures, 25 to 50 Americans are killed yearly by floods, winds, and destruction caused by hurricanes. Often times, those who choose to ignore storm warnings become victims of Mother Nature's fury.

1. What is a hurricane, anyway?
Essentially a tropical low-pressure system, consisting of organized clouds and strong thunderstorms that circulate (counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere) around a central area, hurricanes are classified as such when they produce wind speeds of over 74 mph. Storms with wind speeds between 39 and 73 mph are classified as tropical storms, and organized systems with winds below 39 mph are classified as tropical depressions.

2. How do they happen?
Tropical depressions (which sometimes build into hurricanes) form when a pre-existing weather system such as a simple thunderstorm picks up heat and energy through contact with warm ocean waters. Winds which carry moisture from the ocean's surface spiral up into the storm's low-pressure center. When that moisture condenses into drops, more energy is created, and the storm begins to grow larger and move higher into the atmosphere. Eventually, the eye of the storm will form around rapidly sinking air that dries and warms the area around it. A hurricane can "live" for over two weeks, and in that time travel thousands of miles. It may lose strength and die when high-speed upper-atmospheric winds tear the system apart, or as is often the case, when landfall robs the storm of its all-important moisture source.

3. Have they always been around?
The deadliest storm in recent history occurred in October 1780, when an estimated 20,000 lost their lives in the Caribbean over the course of six days. In 1900, a hurricane struck Galveston, Texas and killed over 8,000 people. Over the course of the last century, deaths throughout the world have declined, as construction techniques have been steadily improved. However, with modernization, monetary damage from storms has skyrocketed. Hurricane Andrew, which struck Florida in 1992, caused an estimated $26.5 billion in damage.

4. Do we know when they're coming?
For over 50 years, scientists from all over the world have been watching, flying through, and studying hurricanes. As technology has progressed, techniques for predicting and tracking the storms have improved. Yet the secrets behind formation and movement of hurricanes have still not completely revealed themselves, and forecasts that attempt to predict their paths beyond a day or two are educated guesses at best.

5. Why are hurricanes named?
Hurricanes have been given names for hundreds of years. In the West Indies, it was once tradition to name a storm after the particular saint's day on which it occurred. During World War II, it became common practice to name hurricanes after females. In 1978, the World Meteorological Association approved a plan to use both male and female names, all of an international flavor, which would be chosen a number of years in advance. Once a system with counter-clockwise circulation and wind speeds of 39 mph is identified, the Tropical Prediction Center near Miami, Florida assigns a name from the predetermined list. The letters Q, U, X, Y and Z are not used, due to the scarcity of names beginning with those respective letters. Storms that cause significant death and/or destruction have their names officially "retired" from the pool of future names.