Hebert Box

They are named for former National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center forecaster Paul Hebert, who observed in the late 1970s that most strong hurricanes (characterized as those with winds exceeding 110 miles per hour (177 km/h)) which had struck South Florida since 1900 had also passed through one of these two small 335-mile-by-335-mile (517-km-by-517-km) square geographic regions.

[1] The first Hebert Box is located east of Puerto Rico over the US Virgin Islands, between 15° and 20° north latitude and 60° to 65° west longitude.

This was the first area that Hebert discovered, and provides an indication for the behavior of Cape Verde type storms, which form off of the western coast of Africa near the islands of the same name.

The boxes are located such that hurricanes have plenty of space to intensify after passing through them, and the prevailing winds tend to push them towards Florida.

These tend to either push the hurricane more westward across the Caribbean Sea towards the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, or into the Gulf of Mexico where they threaten Mexico and the Gulf Coast states, or eastwards causing them to curve outwards over the Atlantic and miss landfall altogether.