I need help understanding huricanes..?

Question

if a cat 5 hurricane (155mph winds) makes land fall.. and huricane winds extand out 70 miles.... if the huricane is moving at 15 miles per hour....will you feel the 155 mph winds for up to 8 hours hours ?

second question is will you feel them 70 miles inland as well as 70 miles to each side as it comes ashore ?

Answer 1

Nope,  The wind speed is lower the farther you are from the eye.  Right near the eye is where the wind speed is the highest.  In the link below (in slide 18) you can find an amazing graph of windspeed as a function of distance from the eye for the Hurricane Katrina.  It's symmetric of course.

For Katrina, the windspeed was about 20m/sec at about 150km away from the eye and peaked near 60m/sec right on the eyewall (60m/sec is about 134 miles per hour).  There are two lines on the graph, the first is for FL (flight level wind speed).  The second is for SFC (surface wind speed).