adminJOHANNESBURG. — Cyclone Freddy, the most energy-intense tropical cyclone ever recorded, finally dissipated last week, but not before leaving more than 500 people dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, and millions facing heightened food insecurity on Africa’s southeast coast.
“The poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, chair of the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, linking the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy in Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar to human-caused climate change driven by unmitigated carbon emissions.
As warming temperatures make cyclones more intense and frequent, “the world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Diouf Sarr added, in an LDC media release urging global action based on the latest UN climate science report.
One of only four recorded cyclones to have maintained their strength across the entire Indian Ocean, Freddy formed off the coast of Australia in early February and finally dissipated on March 15 over Mozambique, around 8,000 kilometres to the west.
It is likely the longest-lasting tropical hurricane on record, having churned back and forth across the warm waters of the Mozambique Channel for nearly two weeks after first making landfall on the island of Madagascar on February 19.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has yet to formally confirm a length record, but whatever the final tally, Freddy will have far outlived the previous record-holder, Hurricane John, which spent 31 days as a named Pacific storm from August 11 to September 13, 1994, writes the Washington Post.
Confirmed as the most energetic storm ever observed, Freddy weighed in at 86 units of accumulated cyclone energy (ACE), a metric that “reflects both a storm’s intensity and duration.” With that much ACE, the single storm Freddy contained more energy than 100 of the past 172 Atlantic hurricane seasons.
Freddy’s longevity owed to the fact that it “rapidly intensified an unprecedented seven times,” the Post says. Rapid intensification describes a 55-kilometre-per-hour jump in the storm’s winds within a 24-hour period.
“While most major hurricanes and storms do rapidly intensify at least once, anything more than three times in a storm’s life cycle is exceptional.” — www.theenergymix.com
Online Reporter