While the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30, the typhoon and cyclone seasons follow slightly different patterns.
In the northeastern Pacific, the official season runs from May 15 to November 30. In the northwestern Pacific, typhoons are most common from late June through December. And the northern Indian Ocean sees cyclones from April to December.
Whatever you choose call them, these monster storms are powerful natural events with the capacity to wreak some serious havoc.
According to NOAA's National Hurricane Center, the average hurricane eye—the still center where pressure is lowest and air temperature is highest—stretches 30 miles (48 kilometers) across, with some growing as large as 120 miles (200 kilometers) wide.
The strongest storms, equivalent to Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, have sustained winds that exceed 155 miles per hour (250 kilometers per hour).
With the aid of satellites and computer models, such storms can be predicted several days in advance and are relatively easy to track. But as Hurricane Sandy showed recently, predicting the path that a hurricane or typhoon or cyclone will take after it's formed is still tricky.