Weather Fact Wednesday: The Brown Ocean Effect

Every year tropical cyclones form in the Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean with some making landfall and others staying over water creating issues for ships. When one storm does make landfall; however, no matter the strength, it starts to weaken as it moves inland. Or does it?

Known as the Brown Ocean Effect (BOE), it was first investigated in 2007 with the U.S. landfalling Tropical Storm Erin, but was seen in past seasons, such as Tropical Storm Bill in 2015. Since the turn of the century there have been nearly 400 named storms that have formed in the Atlantic, with under 5% of them having BOE characteristics, so most often the laws of nature stay intact.

While the Brown Ocean Effect is not a common occurrance, scientist’s have learned that a couple of conditions have always been observed with storms that did stay strong when making landfall. One conclusion is that the wetter the soil is before a tropical system impacts an area, the better chance it has of sustaining it’s strength over land, and secondly, the ground must be very warm and have a similar temperature to the sea, so the tropical storm sustains it strength as it moves further inland.

As more studies on a tropical storm’s behavior is becoming more scrutinized, having this BOE knowledge will help to properly predict a future storm’s behavior as it impacts, not just the coast, but places much further away.

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