Learning English

Introduction

Tropical storms, also known as hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons can be incredibly destructive, but where do they come from and how do they start? BBC Weather forecaster and presenter Darren Bett tells us. Watch this video to practise your listening skills and learn useful vocabulary to talk about extreme weather.

1. Comprehension quiz

Watch the video and answer the questions.

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More in this series: How we talk about weather

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2. Vocabulary quiz

Fill the gaps in this quiz to test yourself.

spinning
moving is a circular direction

equator
the line that goes around the world, at the same distance between the north and south poles

equatorial
areas near the equator

open water
a large area of water that is not surrounded by land

highlands
an area with mountains

thunderstorms
heavy rain together with lightning - bright flashes of electricity, and thunder - a loud noise

flooding
areas of land covered with water, especially after heavy rain

gusty winds
brief but powerful intervals of wind

conditions
the weather at a particular moment

sea surface temperature
the temperature of the top layer of water in the sea

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript. 

Phil
Hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons - we've all seen the damage that these tropical storms cause, but where do they come from? Here's BBC weather forecaster and presenter, Darren Bett.

Darren Bett
Storms can cause damage to towns and cities that can last for weeks if not months. I'm going to look at the terminology, the words that somebody like I would use. I'm a forecaster and a weather presenter on the BBC.

Storms are given different names, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones. They're all the same, they're just a big, mass of cloud that's spinning round that can be hundreds of kilometres wide and maybe 16 kilometres high.

They're given different names depending on where they form. So, a hurricane is given the name because it forms in the North Atlantic or the eastern side of the Pacific, again, north of the equator. Typhoon is given a name because it's formed in the West Pacific, and a cyclone forms in the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific.

Now, most of these storms will form over open water, warm water, but sometimes a hurricane can start its journey all the way in Africa over the Ethiopian Highlands. Here in the mountains, you have a bunch of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and some flooding and really strong and gustywinds. Then those thunderstorms travel from east to west across equatorial Africa, coming out of the west coast of Africa, and if conditions are just right, so you've got sea surface temperatures of 27 degrees Celsius or higher, And if the wind speed and direction isn't changing very much at all, up through the cloud, and you don't have dry air getting drawn in, blown in from the Sahara desert, then this bunch of thunderstorms can start spinning near the equator and strengthening.

The winds will pick up, become stronger, it will then become from a tropical storm to a hurricane. That, then, gets steered by the winds over towards the Caribbean and into North America, sometimes making landfall.

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