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:
“All the morning we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which was several miles distant.... It was a very inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. Instead of having a dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic Ocean to growl for a whole Cape!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics—none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)