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I have shared here in the past that I am somewhat drawn to the Weather Channel. Not when they over the same thing every hour, but by many of the special feature shows they run on different kinds of weather. Here’s another weird, curious thing about me. I am fascinated by hurricanes. It’s not that I enjoy any of the destruction they leave in their path, just the phenomenon of them in general. Their formation, how weather patterns affect their growth or demise, and how their paths are tracked.

What makes this weird, is that I don’t live anywhere remotely close to where hurricanes are a threat. I did, however, grow up in Houston on the Gulf of Mexico, and every year the low-laying area of town I lived in was flooded at least once. It’s harder for me to remember a school year starting on time, than the ones that didn’t because of flooding. They would just roll in randomly throughout the summer, we’d always have to board up the house and head for higher ground. Most of the time, there wasn’t any damage to our house, just the community, but I would always be the one to carefully track their progress during this pseudo-evacuation. That must be where it comes from.

Today, the National Hurricane Center is bookmarked in my browsers, and I frequently check it when the Atlantic is alive with activity. I try to stay away from Weather.com, because they sensationalize the smallest crap, and I just want to read the scientific data. While I was looking at the NHC today, I thought to myself, “How strange is this behavior?” I don’t understand what draws me to them. I am only moderately curious about earthquakes, and I have been through some fairly large ones while living on the West Coast, but they don’t grab me like the hurricanes. If I grew up in the Midwest, would I behave like this about tornadoes and snowstorms?

Does anyone else share this curiosity about natural disasters or weather in general?