Hurricane Andrew was a Category 5 storm that hit South Florida on August 24 th 1992 with wind speeds of 165 miles per hour. As the hurricane season of 1992 approached, a massive tropical storm formed in the Atlantic Ocean in mid-August, and began slowly trekking toward the Florida coastline. Hurricanes need four conditions to form: low air pressure warm temperatures moist ocean air tropical winds (near the equator). It was determined that Hurricane Andrew had maximum sustained winds of 175 mph. Although the 1992 Atlantic hurricane season was below average, Hurricane Andrew was the exception to that. In all, Andrew caused about $26.5 billion in damages, making it the second costliest hurricane on record (when adjusted for inflation). At the time of landfall, it was the costliest hurricane in our nation’s history, causing over $26 million in damages. And only three storms—Katrina in 2005, Camille in 1969 and an unnamed hurricane that struck the Florida Keys in 1935—were more intense, according to statistics complied by the National Hurricane Center. Only Hurricane Katrina caused more damage. This hurricane blasted the Bahamas, southeast Florida and south central Louisiana, taking a path extremely similar to Hurricane Betsy, which also struck southern Florida and Louisiana.However, unlike Betsy, Andrew did not make flooding in New Orleans. He made his way west across the Tropical Atlantic and made landfall eventually in the Bahamas, then southern Florida. Andrew was originally categorized as a Category-4 hurricane, but scientists re-categorized it as a Category-5 hurricane in 2002. How Hurricanes Form and Die. Andrew reached hurricane strength on the morning of 22 August, thereby becoming the first Atlantic hurricane to form from a tropical wave in nearly two years. Andrew was a small and ferocious Cape Verde hurricane that wrought unprecedented economic devastation along a path through the northwestern Bahamas, the southern Florida peninsula, and south-central Louisiana. The meteorological history of Hurricane Andrew, the strongest tropical cyclone of the 1992 Atlantic hurricane season, lasted from mid to late August 1992.The hurricane developed from a tropical wave that moved off the coast of Africa on August 14. Hurricane Andrew was the fourth most intense hurricane to affect the United States at time of landfall, with a central pressure of 926 mb. This hurricane blasted the Bahamas, southeast Florida and south central Louisiana, taking a path extremely similar to Hurricane Betsy, which also struck southern Florida and Louisiana.However, unlike Betsy, Andrew did not make flooding in New Orleans.
Andrew Facts: Adjusted for inflation, Hurricane Andrew is the second costliest storm in U.S. history, after Hurricane Katrina (2005).
Hurricane Andrew began as a tropical depression off the west coast of Africa near the Cape Verde islands on August 16; the next day it was classified as a tropical storm by the National Hurricane Center of the U.S. National Weather Service.After traveling west-northwest across the Atlantic Ocean, it turned northwest, avoiding the islands of the eastern Caribbean Sea. Hurricane Andrew. Two days later, after it passed just south of the Cape Verde islands, the wave became a tropical depression. The storm caused damage to south Louisiana and the Bahamas, but the brunt of its impact fell on South Florida, where: Hurricane Andrew began as a tropical wave that crossed the west coast of Africa into the tropical North Atlantic on August 14, 1992. Twelve years after the event, the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA reanalyzed data obtained during Hurricane Andrew in a large effort to extend and improve the quality of the NHC’s original best-track and intensity database.