The next two months are the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season, a good time to point out that while these rainy, windy storms all come in about the same shape, but they can differ widely in size.

All hurricanes are generally circular or oval-shaped and resemble a buzzsaw or, to borrow an analogy from astronomy, a spiral galaxy. In general, hurricanes are a few hundred miles across, but as seen in this comparison of Floyd in 1999 on the left, and Andrew from 1992 on the right, both east of Florida, some are much smaller than others. Size doesn't necessarily correlate to intensity, as both Floyd and Andrew were packing winds above 120 mph.

Here's an image from just a few weeks ago of two nearby hurricanes in the western Pacific, where hurricanes are called typhoons. These are also of vastly different size. Typhoon Fengshen, on the right, had winds of 125 mph, while the much smaller and, in this case, weaker, Typhoon Fung-Wong, had winds of only 75 mph.