2017 has been a year that many of us will remember for the various records that were broken, as well as the amount of material and human damage that occurred. Without a doubt, the phenomena that have starred the most this year that we are about to leave are tropical cyclones, whose season in the Atlantic will go down in history for having formed ten tropical storms in a row that made it into hurricane category. Furthermore, the 2017 hurricane season It is a clear example of the intense cyclonic activity that has been seen.
But there were other events that we can't forget either: like the California wildfires, or how the wind carried sand from the Sahara desert to America.
Our planet is a world where, you could say, everything is connected. We often don't think about it, but what happens in one place can affect the rest of the globe. Atlantic hurricanes form near the African continent; however, they affect America. This year, 2017, there have been several that have caused significant damage, such as Irma y María, which reached the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Tropical islands like Dominica, in the Caribbean, were totally devastated. In Europe, specifically in Ireland, the hurricane arrived during the second week of October Ophelia, the strongest in the last 30 years. In addition, this season has been considered the busiest in more than a century.
How did these phenomena come about? To show it, NASA's Goddard Center has released a video showing. It combined data obtained from satellites throughout the year with mathematical models in a simulation computer. In addition, the NASA has been at the forefront of studying these phenomena.
The result is this incredible short video where you can see how the main hurricanes were generated, where they went and how they finally weakened. You can also see how the winds carried tiny particles of dust, sea salt (in blue), sand from the Sahara Desert to America (in brown), and smoke from fires in the Pacific (in grey). Phenomena such as the collision of three Category 4 hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean, which demonstrates the magnitude of the cyclonic activity that year.
