Tukuk-OSA hurricane, a typhoon and a cyclone are the same animal born in different oceans: a tropical cyclone, named by basin — Atlantic and north-east Pacific (hurricane), north-west Pacific (typhoon), Indian Ocean and south Pacific (cyclone). The recipe is short: sea surface at least around 26.5 °C through a deep layer, moist unstable air, weak wind shear so the stack is not torn apart, and enough planetary spin to start rotation. That last condition explains something people ask every season: a tropical cyclone can never form right on the equator, where the Coriolis twist is zero — and it can never cross the equator from one hemisphere to the other on its own.
The engine is heat, not wind. A mature storm lifts tens of thousands of tonnes of water vapour per second and converts released condensation heat into wind with an efficiency a power plant would envy, exporting the rest as rain. A single Atlantic hurricane can release heat at a rate around twice the global human energy consumption — that is why “category” scales fast: Saffir–Simpson Category 1 begins at 119 km/h (74 mph) winds, and Category 5 from 252 km/h. But category is only wind. The deadliest hazard in a landfalling cyclone is storm surge — the dome of seawater pushed ashore — which has killed far more people than the winds in nearly every recorded disaster, because nearly everyone drowning had no idea they were in a flood.
The Pacific side adds two names to the year: typhoon season peaks into late summer and autumn, and warm-season storms in the west are typically stronger and bigger than Atlantic cousins because the warm pool there is deeper. Climate change does not create cyclones — it loads the dice: warmer seas mean more moisture and energy, storms that intensify faster, and slower forward motion that dumps catastrophic rain totals on one spot.