I have been very busy with work, and with a new computer that needs a little more memory. I work from home, and I used to keep a browser open behind my work window and periodically check things out when I got a spare couple minutes, but after a few hours now the browser will freeze my Citrix connection to work. So now I go several hours in a day without seeing news.
Today I get done with work, open Facebook, and see posted on FaceBook an announcement from the Central Florida Hurricane center (a rather geeky website dedicated to non-hyped discussions of tropical weather) that we have a subtropical storm in the eastern Atlantic.
Didn’t hurricane season just end?
The caption I wrote comes from caution I learned in grad school studying atmospheric science — data is not perfect, does not cover the globe. That crazy season where the storm names had to go deep into the Greek alphabet (2005) certainly looks like an outlier, and probably was, but at least one storm from that season was discovered after the fact via data analysis. Decades earlier that storm probably would never have been noticed. Tropical Storm Zeta from that season formed on December 29 2005, and finally dissipated on January 6 2006.
So a January tropical system in the Atlantic is not unheard of, and before the advent of weather satellites could have easily never been seen. But something about this storm is a little disquieting. A week or so ago the National Hurricane Center had a region of interest they were following off the South Carolina coast (I think — I’ve been really busy, so not checking these things out like I would like). In April of 2014, when the Pacific ocean belched out a huge amount of heat many climatologists expect an el-Nino to form, but it didn’t. The little child waited until this past summer to form. I’m really beginning to think that we’ve passed a “bifurcation” with the climate.
From the Hurricane Center’s forecast discussion:
Alex is the first tropical or subtropical storm to form in January
since an unnamed system did so in 1978, and is only the fourth known
to form in this month in the historical record that begins in 1851.
So yeah, I guess this is rare. The system is not forecast to get much stronger despite low shear for a few days as it’s moving over some pretty cold water (at least we can still depend on the oceans cooling off in winter), and is expected to merge with a frontal system near Greenland in a few days.
National Hurricane Center Website