North Atlantic Ocean
This region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico. Tropical cyclone formation here varies widely from year to year, ranging from one to over twenty-five per year. Most Atlantic tropical storms and hurricanes form between June 1 and November 30. The United States National Hurricane Center monitors the basin and issues reports, watches and warnings about tropical weather systems for the Atlantic Basin as one of the Regional Specialized Meteorological Centres for tropical cyclones as defined by the World Meteorological Organization. On average, 11 named storms (of tropical storm or higher strength) occur each season, with an average of 6 becoming hurricanes and 2 becoming major hurricanes. The climatological peak of activity is around September 10 each season.
The United States Atlantic coast, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and Bermuda are frequently affected by storms in this basin. Venezuela, the south-east of Canada and Atlantic Macaronesian islands also are occasionally affected. Many of the more intense Atlantic storms are Cape Verde-type hurricanes, which form off the west coast of Africa near the Cape Verde islands. Occasionally, a hurricane that evolves into an extratropical cyclone can reach western Europe, including Hurricane Gordon, which spread high winds across Spain and the British Isles in September 2006. Hurricane Vince, which made landfall on the southwestern coast of Spain as a tropical depression in October 2005, is the only known system to impact mainland Europe as a tropical cyclone.
Read more about this topic: Tropical Cyclone Basins
Famous quotes containing the words atlantic ocean, north, atlantic and/or ocean:
“The Atlantic Ocean was something then.”
—John Guare (b. 1938)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)