Hurricane Stocks

[littlefish]

Cape Verdes (referring to CV storms) are the names of the group of islands off the West African coast. If you look at the following link at the bottom of this post and look toward 25W, 15N around Africa, you will see some white dots off the African coast. Those are the Cape Verdes islands.

The reason the storms are referred to as Cape Verdes storms is in part because the closest land mass to where the storms tend to originate is the Cape Verdes islands. Many Cape Verdes storms originate very close to this cluster of islands.

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/loop-vis.html

But they have to make it all the way across the Atlantic. Considering there aren't land masses to obstruct them, if conditions are good and wind shear low these storms can often get very powerful and/or very big. Sometimes never hitting land as tropical storms but often interferring with land at some point. That all depends on steering currents (the tendency for Azores highs and the Bermuda highs often gives geenral direction to the storms).