Physics can impede Gulf super storm

With Tropical Storms Laura and Marco forecast to be in the Gulf of Mexico together within a few days, you might wonder if they could potentially collide or perhaps form one huge hurricane.

On Saturday, Marco was about 50 miles southwest of Cuba’s western tip. Laura was about 60 miles southwest of coastal Ponce, Puerto Rico.

“Thankfully, any worries about the two storms merging into a ‘super-hurricane’ are unfounded,” said weather.us meteorologist Jack Sillin in his blog Friday. “When tropical cyclones arrive in close proximity to another tropical cyclone, the interaction is detrimental for both storms.”

Sillin said that if one storm is much stronger than the other, the weaker system will usually weaken substantially or dissipate.

If Laura and Marco are close enough together – which may or may not occur – what could happen is something called the Fujiwhara effect, which describes the rotation of two storms around each other. It’s most common with tropical cyclones such as typhoons or hurricanes, but it also occurs in other cases.

When two hurricanes spinning in the same direction pass close enough to each other, they begin an intense dance around their common center point, 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.