The surprise was evident in what the Hurricane Center meteorologist wrote in this morning’s tropical discussion on the storm – “Remarkably, Alex has undergone the transformation into a hurricane”.
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Hurricane warnings are in effect for the central Azores and tropical storm warnings are in effect for the eastern Azores.
The official Atlantic hurricane season typically runs from the beginning of June to the end of November.
Its activity is unusual as tropical storms normally occur over warm waters and is unexpected in the North Atlantic in January. Winds of 40 mph extend outward up to 150 miles from the center.
The storm is expected to dump 3 to 5 inches of rain on the islands, with 7 inches possible in isolated areas.
The National Hurricane Center reports that the central Azores, tiny islands nearly 1,000 miles west of Lisbon, are under a hurricane warning right now. From a climatological perspective, this makes flawless sense, as tropical cyclones generally draw their power from the warmer waters near the equator during the warmest time of the year.
Sometimes subtropical storms can become fully tropical over the course of time.
Positioned 785 miles south-southwest of the Azores, Alex has maximum sustained winds of 50 mph. The National Hurricane Center warned Azores that the heavy rainfall and wind can cause life-threatening mudslides and risky flooding along the shores.
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Alex is located well in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and doesn’t pose a threat to the United States; however, it will affect the Azores. Alice holds the record for the strongest January hurricane on record at 90 mph, which Alex could match or even exceed in the next 24 hours. To get both of these storms simultaneously in January is something that would have had a vanishingly small probability more than 30 years ago, before global warming really began to ramp up.
