The Hurricane Center’s forecast discussion on Thursday morning states: “Remarkably, Alex has undergone the transformation into a hurricane”. Maximum sustained winds were near 85 miles per hour (140 km/h) with higher gusts, with little change in strength being forecast through Friday.
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Hurricane warnings are in effect for the central Azores and tropical storm warnings are in effect for the eastern Azores.
Still, the early hurricane does not necessarily portend an unusually active storm period during the Atlantic hurricane season from June through November, Feltgen said. Alice initially formed into a hurricane on December 31, 1954, but then remained a hurricane into early January 1955. An El Nino-related tropical storm formed southwest of Hawaii last week.
The hurricane center said that the center of Alex was expected to pass over portions of the islands on Friday morning. Subtropical storms have wind field that is much larger than a tropical storm and have a cold core at the center of the storm. Alex poses no threat to North America, but it is an extremely rare and interesting feature! A risky storm surge is expected to produce significant coastal flooding near and to the east of the center of Alex.
“Gale-force winds from a swirling body of low pressure that passed north of Bermuda caused sporadic power outages, and had many wondering if hurricane season had somehow come back”, reported The Royal Gazette. A subtropical storm is a storm that has some but not all the characteristics of a tropical cyclone. Tropical storm Pali, only the third such system to develop in January in more than 40 years, had weakened to a depression by Thursday and was expected to dissipate in the next day or so.
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Meteorologists have been watching Alex for almost a week after it formed off a frontal boundary off the southeast US coastline, he said.
