Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
Hurricanes on the east coast travel from the SE tropics of the Atlantic and go taking a track usually Northeasterly from Florida towards New England. How they heck would a Hurricane Storm system have carried the from Virginia to the South Pacific. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't happen.
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That's right. Although Jules Verne prided himself on getting the "science" right in his stories, I'm pretty sure the science of hurricanes was not well known when he wrote
The Mysterious Island. The traveler's boarded the balloon on March 25. I doubt that a hurricane has ever formed in March. The historic hurricane tracks from 1851 - 2005 are shown in the attached figure. As BOb said, the pattern is clear ... they form in the southern Atlantic and after striking the U.S. coast, they move inland and veer to the northeast. Also, notice that none of the tracks crosses the equator into the southern hemisphere.
EDIT: I did some more checking and in March 1908 a category 2 hurricane did form in the Caribbean. But it stayed east of Puerto Rico and did not make landfall on the U.S. mainland.