A current carrying warm water north off the coast of South America creates similar eddies in the open ocean. But little research has been done on how they affect hurricanes or whether they influence the kind of rapid intensification that last year fired up Hurricane Matthew, with its sustained winds increasing by about 83 mph in less than 24 hours to become a powerful Category 5 storm packing 160 mph winds. The storm left hundreds dead in Haiti, skirted the Florida coast and caused massive flooding and nearly 50 more deaths in the Southeastern United States.

Johna Rudzin used satellite imagery to identify one Caribbean eddy south of Haiti in September 2014, then designed an experiment that focused on the surface waters down to 165 feet — the zone that interacts with hurricanes. In a single day, she and a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration flight crew flew over the 125-mile-wide eddy and dropped 55 sensors to measure temperature, salinity, density and other variables.

What they discovered was surprising, and a first.

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Johna Rudzin, a University of Miami student and lead author on a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, prepares a sensor to drop in a massive ocean eddy. Her research found ocean eddies may contain a layer that prevents waters from mixing, fueling hurricane intensity. Courtesy of University of Miami

Eddies exist across the world’s oceans and can help fuel hurricanes. A new University of Miami study found that some in the Caribbean may contain a barrier, created when South American rivers dump massive plumes of freshwater into the ocean and prevent deeper cooler water from mixing with warm surface waters. NASA