>>20152268Yeah, the majority of storms will naturally be sent out to sea by the tides or a myriad of other factors. In truth we still don't entirely know everything that causes storms to shift, and even up to landfall the storms do what we usually refer to as "wobble" which are slight alterations in where the eye/center track and these can have massive ramifications in terms of what area gets the worst of it and what doesn't.
Wind shear is defined usually as an increase of wind speed at high levels in the atmosphere. If a Hurricane ventures into a part of the ocean where this is happening, the wind shear removes the heat and moisture needed for a storm to strengthen and also usually distorts the center, actively weakening the hurricane and there's usually a very visible effect on radar too; see the attached gif for a particularly brutal example of a tropical cyclone's core being shredded by strong wind shear. Ends up turning into a naked swirl, the poor thing. Shear can not only weaken a storm but structurally ruin it if it's intense enough and that takes some time to rebuild no matter how good the conditions are. Intense wind shear is about the worst thing that can happen to a hurricane.
>I never really thought about how much building codes change depending on where you areYeah, there's a reason if you look up a list of "deadliest atlantic hurricanes of all time" almost all of them will be in central/latin america. For all it's faults the US does have decent protocol regarding natural disasters like this, even politicians cover up the true extent of basically all death tolls of hurricanes since it doesn't stand to benefit them and can quickly devolve into a political disaster. I know a guy who worked on the EMS ground in the aftermath of Michael and he said they were still pulling out bodies weeks after the fact. The "official" death toll of that storm for instance is total bologna.
