The magic number is 80 degrees Fahrenheit. What we are seeing in the Atlantic right now is temperatures that are 82 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, almost two to four degrees above their normal temperatures.

218

I always say, the way you spell fire is F-U-E-L. There has been a lot of fuel building here, with the big drought and the big rains.

201

The past three years have been a very large disturbance in the climate force. The Pacific is really the mother of these global climate systems -- and there has been a fundamental switch in the climate in the past two years.

178

It's a classic Santa Ana, arriving right on schedule.

173

The hurricanes naturally tend to move from east to west because of the rotation of the Earth. The northern part of the hurricane moves faster than the southern part of the hurricane, so they tend to move across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean and the United States.

168

Essentially what happened was that quantitatively we had our fingers on the pulse of the global oceans for the first time in history. We collected more data in the first year than they had in the previous century of data.

167

Although she's doing a slow fade right now, globally the atmosphere is still behaving as if she's still there and this is part of the legacy, or the hangover, from La Nina.

157

Really, the ocean is simply the fuel tank for these great hurricanes, and right now, I would characterize the South Atlantic as high octane.

114

I call her the little lady with the big dry punch.

96