A hurricane is what is known as a tropical cyclone, which is a very strong, powerful storm that can produce strong winds, strong rain, and storm surge that can really devastate coastal communities. They're called hurricanes in the Atlantic, but typhoons in the Pacific or cyclones in other ocean basins around the world.

Hurricanes form by extracting heat from the ocean and converting that into strong winds and rain, like an engine of a car. In the same way that when wind blows by you it can take heat off of your body through evaporation, the same thing happens over the ocean. They can then concentrate that energy into the swirling winds that then expand and grow as they travel across the ocean.

One of the things scientists often look at is the ocean temperature, so the warmer the ocean, the more heat that it can extract and convert via that powerful engine into wind and rain.

The main wind scale scientists look at is called the Saffir-Simpson wind scale, and that has five different categories from category one to five, where five is extreme destruction. That category scale, though, is based entirely on wind, and so it doesn't encompass all of the dangers that hurricanes have, for example, heavy rain or storm surge. So, even though you may have, for example, a Category 1 storm, like Superstorm Sandy, it can still cause a lot of damage through water, even though the wind category is quite lower.

With global warming, we're putting a tremendous amount of heat into the oceans, which is the fuel that powers hurricanes. One of the impacts that we see with increased global warming is sea level rise that can contribute to enhanced storm surge from hurricanes.

In recent years, there’s been a growing trend for more storms that are rapidly intensifying than in prior years. Storms now are finding themselves in areas where the ocean temperature is warmer, and they can extract that heat more efficiently and produce rapidly intensifying storms in ways that we haven't seen in prior decades.

There are certain countries that just happen to lie in the path of hurricanes, so two of the countries that get hit the most in the world are the Philippines and Taiwan. They face the same problems as the U.S. in terms of dealing with tropical cyclones and heavy rain, the winds and the storm surge.

“It’s really a global problem that we need to deal with together as a scientific community,” said Michael Bell, a tropical cyclone expert. “We all have to work together to try and make better predictions and better emergency response.”

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