Quote Originally Posted by MrPolite
umm excuse my ignorance... but do these storms usually harm certain cities? or is it always random?
As a general rule, the storms are 'born' just to the west of Africa. They float westwards picking up energy from warm near equatorial seas making landfall somewhere in or around the Gulf Of Mexico/Caribbean.

They become more frequent in around a 40 year cycle(1920/1960/2000) Not much is understood why this should be the case. There are erroneous 'facts' cycling around about global warming, and El Nino, but there's no evidence to support that either makes the frequency of Cat4/5 storms increase.

As for is it random? The answer is no. The storms follow the laws of physics (thermodynamics/hyrdodynamics) like everything else. Like most weather phenomena it's reasonable easy to produce mesoscale forecasts (it's heading for the carribean) but at a local level (it's heading for New Orleans) it's extremely difficult.