![]() Hurricanes do not typically form when sea surface temperatures are below 26° Celsius (78.8 degrees Fahrenheit), so it seemed uncanny for Alex to form when water temperatures in the northeast Atlantic were roughly 22☌. The map below shows the track of Alex relative to the tracks of all reported storms in NOAA’s record from 1842 to 2015. Alex is not just unusual for being a hurricane in the dead of winter it is also unusual as just the second storm on record to form so far north and east in the Atlantic (north of 30 degrees North latitude, east of 30 degrees West longitude). The storm was about 800 kilometers (500 miles) south of the Azores, which it is predicted to pass over in the coming days. Two hours after the image was acquired, the storm was reported to have sustained winds of 75 knots (85 miles or 140 kilometers per hour) and a central pressure of 981 millibars. Azores time (13:00 Universal Time) on January 14, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this view of hurricane Alex. On January 14, 2016, a tropical depression in the eastern Atlantic evolved into hurricane Alex it became the earliest hurricane in the basin since 1938 and just the fourth January hurricane in 150 years of records.Īt 11:00 a.m. Just days after hurricane Pali became the earliest Central Pacific hurricane on record, the Atlantic basin spun up its own unusual storm. ![]() ![]() Hurricanes have arrived early this year in the northern hemisphere. ![]()
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