Disclaimer: I am not any kind of meteoroligist and possibly don’t know what I’m talking about.
For one thing, I assume it has something to do with cool water temperatures, which are killer to hurricanes. There are hurricanes that form in the east Pacific, but like all hurricanes their movement is generally westward, so not that many hit the west coast of North America to begin with. To directly hit a place like Oregon, one would have to actually loop all the way around and somehow still be a hurricane in the end (which I’m guessing is probably an impossible scenario due to the ocean temperatures and other weather patterns I don’t know about). I think East Pacific hurricanes do curve northward sometimes, impacting Mexico, but a storm moving straight toward the northwest U.S. in that direction would of course not survive all the way up the west coast over land.
I don’t know about Los Angeles, but I have a source that says “a few have hit California,” wherever and whenever that may have been.
Here is an interesting map I found the other day while noodling around on the web, it shows the number of billion dollar climate and weather disiaters in the U.S. from 1980 to 2003, state by state. It makes me glad that I live in WI.
Excellent cite. Man, if I could find a worldwide map like that- then one that didn’t pay attention to dollars but instead to lives lost, why we’d have something !
<—scurries off in a crab-like yet intellectually envigorating manner to Google.
On the other hand, Wisconsin gets plenty of blizzards. Blizzards will tend to be underrepresented on that map, since they don’t usually cause much infrastructure damage, but they do often have a fairly high death toll.
I’m not a real weather buff, but I do live in Washington, so I can sort of comment on why the Northwest doesn’t seem to get hurricanes.
We do have a warm water current (The Japan Current, I believe it’s called) that hits us and drives most of our weather systems. But it isn’t the same intensity of warm you get in the Caribbean.
We often get storms that carry “hurricane-force winds”, defined, I believe, as sustained winds over 70 knots (or maybe it’s 75). However, these storms are not organized as the spiral powerhouses that hurricanes are, so the energy is less. They look, on sattelite photos, more like a single arm of a spiral. We rarely get winds above 120 or so.
Another reason you don’t hear much about severe weather in the Northwest is that most of the population is inland. Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Eugene are all a considerable distance from the Pacific. Puget Sound is nothing like the ocean it connects to, and the Columbia river (where Portland is) is even less ocean-like. Vancouver, British Columbia is on the coast, but the giant Vancouver Island blocks a lot of the worst weather. The coastal region is mostly small tourist destinations and logging towns. They’re pretty used to the weather. The worst that usually happens is some of the many rivers will flood for a few days after a serious rain. [There have been a few spectacular things: in the early 60s the cruise ship Catala was anchored in Grays Harbor and was run aground in Ocean Shores by a 100+ knot storm (it rusted on the beach for decades), and in the 40s (I think) a storm collapsed a bluff, dumping the largest hotel on the Washington coast and the only high school in the north half of the county (both in Moclips) into the ocean.]
Pretty much every year, some evil weather happens somewhere in this country, and I am once again glad that our region may be known for its rain, but it rarely kills people. Mostly, we worry about tsunami and earthquake, both of which have a high probablility of hitting us, but have not done so in any really severe way since the area was settled by non-Natives. And there’s always the chance one of these volcanoes will erupt in a catastrophic way (something much worse than 1980’s St. Helens blast is always possible).
Generally the hurricanes in the Pacific move out to sea because the current pushes them out. The current at the relevant latitudes pushes westward across the Pacific. There is a contrary current pushing eastward farther north in the Pacific, but the water up there is not warm enough to spawn hurricanes. At least not right now. In his science fiction novel Mother of Storms, John Barnes hypothesized that serious global warming could push temperatures in the north Pacific high enough to sustain a hurricane, and that a hurricane would thus be able to cycle back and forth across the Pacific for the entire summer, growing all the while.
