2020 Bizarre Weather: Could two hurricanes collide? Here’s what may happen if Laura and Marco meet up in the Gulf

A good way to picture this is to think of two ice skaters who skate quickly toward each other, nearly on a collision course, grab hands as they are about to pass and spin vigorously around in one big circle with their joined hands at the center. The effect is named after Dr. Sakuhei Fujiwhara who was the chief of the Central Meteorological Bureau in Tokyo shortly after the first World War. In 1921, he wrote a paper describing the motions of “vortices” in water. Water vortices, such as whirlpools, are little water whirls that spin around.

When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center, the National Weather Service said. The effect is thought to occur when storms get about 900 miles apart. Storms involved in the Fujiwhara effect are rotating around one another as if they had locked arms and were square dancing. Rather than each storm spinning about the other, they are actually moving about a central point between them, as if both were tied to the same post and each swung around it separately of the other. Yet, the Gulf of Mexico has its limitations when two storms vie for dominance. Some experts said Friday that the watery crater created by plate tectonics (the Gulf) is too small for the legendary Fujiwhara effect.Instead, one storm typically dominates another in such a confined space, either pushing it away or tearing it apart with tendrils of cirrus clouds marking its own cyclone-toppling wind shear. –USA Today