The cyclone has been raging for 35 days and moved from Australia to East Africa.
Sydney/Maputo. When a tropical storm formed over the Timor Sea between Western Australia and Indonesia on the morning of February 6, the Australian weather agency dubbed it “Freddy”. At the time, nobody suspected that the cyclone would rewrite weather history: Because five weeks later it’s still raging – that’s a record since weather records began.
As of today, Monday, it’s 35 days. So far, typhoon or hurricane “John”, which swept across the central and eastern Pacific for 31 days in 1994, and the San Ciriaco hurricane of 1899 have matched: it also lasted 31 days, swept from the mid-Atlantic across the Caribbean, the US -Up the east coast and then east until it dissipated over the North Atlantic.
Freddy has crossed the Indian Ocean to the west in a fairly straight line, but hasn’t let off steam. On the contrary: Mozambique was hit by rain, storms and flooding at the weekend – for the second time. Because Freddy had already reached Mozambique after crossing Madagascar on February 24, but commuted back to Madagascar and from there west again. The poor African country has received the equivalent of over a year’s worth of rain in the last four weeks. At least 28 people there died as a result of the storm.
A rare storm route
Freddy’s route is a rare one: According to climate researchers Micheal Pillay and Jennifer Fitchett, warming seas have shifted the locations where hurricanes form toward the poles over the past 30 years. According to meteorologists, the energy concentrated in Freddy corresponds to that of an entire average hurricane season in the North Atlantic. (bark)
(“Die Presse”, print edition, March 13, 2023)