A series of ferocious storms in the 2008 hurricane season battered coastal regions from the Caribbean islands up to the southeastern United States.

Fulfilling forecasters' predictions for a high number of strong hurricanes, one storm after another in August and September hit the Bahamas, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, the British Turks and Caicos Islands, and the southeastern United States. Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike followed within weeks of each other.

Haiti - the poorest country in the Americas - is ill prepared to prepare for storms or cope with their consequences, and suffered the highest number of deaths when it was hit in turn by all four. It's hard to pin down an exact toll from floods and mudslides caused by a series of storms in August and September 2008 - since many corpses were washed out to sea - but police and local authorities say it was around 700.

Aid workers say at least 800,000 Haitians have been affected, thousands of homes destroyed or damaged, and crops and livestock wiped out. AlertNet has a Haiti floods briefing. The port city of Gonaives was left filled with sludge, without food and clean water, and cut off from supplies. With bridges and roads washed out, helicopter and boat was the only way in.

Cuba - proud of its hurricane alert system and efficient evacuations - evacuated more than 2.5 million people (about 22 percent of the country's 11.4 million population) and escaped with a death toll you could count on the fingers of one hand. But 320,000 homes were damaged by the storms, adding to the housing woes in a country which already had a shortage of about 500,000 homes.

For more, read AlertNet's Hurricane Ike briefing.

U.S. authorities evacuated millions from the path of Gustav and then evacuated some for Ike, anxious not to be caught out as they were in 2005 when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi and left one of the world's wealthiest countries looking woefully unprepared.

AlertNet's Hurricane Katrina crisis briefing has background on the 2005 tragedy and its aftermath.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to November in the Caribbean, posing a threat to coastal communities when tropical storms and hurricanes generate storm surges and trigger landslides and flash floods.

Forecasters have predicted an unusually busy hurricane season for 2008. An average season has 10 tropical storms, of which six strengthen into hurricanes.

A "hurricane" is a revolving tropical storm accompanied by torrential rain and wind speeds exceeding 119 kilometres per hour (74 miles per hour). In the Americas and Caribbean, these storms are called "hurricanes". In the western Pacific, East Asia and Australia they are "typhoons". And in the Indian Ocean they are "cyclones".

AlertNet has a Hurricanes and Cyclones topic briefing, which explains the hurricane scale.

FLOODING IN WIDER REGION

Elsewhere in Latin America, torrential rains between December and May can swamp agricultural land, destroy livelihoods, damage homes and services and force mass evacuations.

In early 2008, devastating floods hit Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru as a weather abnormality known as La Nina brought some of the heaviest rains in a quarter-century, swelling rivers and bursting banks. Ecuador and Peru both declared states of emergency.

Meaning "little girl" in Spanish, La Nina is an unusual cooling of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that can trigger more hurricanes and worse rains in many places.

Death tolls from floods have generally fallen in recent years as countries become more adept at disaster prevention, although experts warn that more people are likely to be affected in future as global warming generates more and bigger floods.

British researchers say they have shown that a half-degree Celsius temperature rise in the Atlantic Ocean can fuel a 40 percent increase in hurricanes. Other factors increasing flood risks include environmental factors such as deforestation and rapid urban growth.