Freddy’s fury: WMO confirms cyclone Freddy’s record 36-day lifespan
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that cyclone Freddy, which wreaked havoc across southeast Africa in early 2023, holds the record for the longest-lived tropical cyclone on record. Freddy maintained its strength for a staggering 36 days.
The cyclone traversed the vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean before making landfall in Madagascar and several southeast African nations, including Mozambique and Malawi, in February-March 2023. It brought with it fierce winds, intense rainfall and destructive storm surges.
The WMO's confirmation comes after a detailed analysis by a committee of international experts on tropical cyclones under the agencies’ Weather and Climate Extremes Archive.
The committee was made up of scientists from the Tropical Cyclone Warning Centre of the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Regional Specialised Meteorological Centre La Réunion of Météo-France in France that forecast the cyclone, as well as scientists from Spain, Canada, Hong Kong, China and the United States.
The long life of recent cyclones, such as Freddy and Fani in the Bay of Bengal in 2019, indicates that these ocean-based storm systems gather much more energy from warm sea surface waters and then disperse it in the form of winds and rainfall as they move over land, affecting coastal and even inland communities.
The interaction with land can occur multiple times, as in the case of cyclone Freddy. Towards the end of its long life, the storm demonstrated unique behaviour by bouncing back and forth between Madagascar and the African mainland, causing devastation totaling $481 million along its path, highlighted the WMO.
Cyclone Freddy formed of the northwestern coast of Australia on February 4, made its first landfall along the Madagascar coast on February 21 and finally dissipated over Malawi on March 14.
“Freddy was a remarkable tropical cyclone, not only for its longevity but also for its ability to survive multiple land interactions, which unfortunately had significant consequences for southeast African populations,” said Chris Velden, committee member and tropical cyclone/satellite expert from the University of Wisconsin, US, in a WMO press release.
WMO has also confirmed Freddy as the second longest travelled tropical cyclone on record. During the 36 days that it was active as at least a tropical storm, Freddy traveled over 12,785 kilometres from the coast of northwest Australia to southern Africa during its record-breaking lifespan.
The longest distance travelled by a tropical cyclone is 13,159 km by hurricane John in the North Pacific Ocean in 1994. The distances are one thirds of the Earth’s circumference, to put things into perspective.
The hurricane also held the record for the longest lived tropical cyclone before cyclone Freddy at 29.75 days.
Cyclone Freddy had also broken other records that were not evaluated by the WMO committee. According to Down To Earth (DTE), there were a total of 16 such records.
For instance, cyclone Freddy underwent rapid intensification seven times, the highest number on record. A tropical cyclone rapidly intensifies when its wind speeds increase by 56 km per hour in 24 hours.
Rapid intensification can confuse weather models and radars that track tropical cyclones and predict their path, wind speeds, and rainfall. When this data is inaccurate, it makes it difficult for weather agencies to forecast tropical cyclones and provide accurate early warnings to communities that may be affected by the storm.
Another record broken by cyclone Freddy was for accumulated cyclone energy, which is calculated as the square of wind speed added every six hours during the storm’s entire lifetime. Cyclone Freddy assimilated as much energy as an entire North Atlantic hurricane season, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US.
Experts told DTE that Freddy lasted so long, went through multiple phases of rapid intensification, and collected and dissipated so much energy because of the warm surface and subsurface sea water at the time, which was an imprint of the excess atmospheric heat being absorbed by the southern Indian Ocean.
In terms of impacts, cyclone Freddy triggered the internal displacement of around 1.4 million people across six countries in Africa, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Out of these, 659,000 were in Malawi, the highest for the landlocked country since data became available in 2009.
Around 12,000 people also died or went missing due to the impacts of cyclone Freddy in Malawi, according to the WMO. In Mozambique, around 180 deaths were recorded, while 1.3 million people were affected at the time. In Madagascar 17 people died and around 2,00,000 people were affected.
The death toll could have been much higher but for the national meteorological agencies of the different countries that were able to provide early warnings to a certain extent so people could be alerted and evacuated in time.
“Tropical Cyclone Freddy was a text book example of the importance of the UN Early Warnings for All initiative to ensure that everyone is protected in the next five years. WMO is committed to working with our partners to achieve this and tackle extreme weather and climate change related risks— one of the biggest challenges of our times,” said Anne-Claire Fontan, scientific officer with the WMO’s Tropical Cyclone Programme.
The keeping of records of extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones is also important to understand how the planet’s climate is changing due to human induced warming of the atmosphere and the oceans.
“The extremes presented for adjudication for the WMO Weather and Climate Extremes Archive are ‘snapshots’ of our current climate. It is possible, and indeed likely, that greater extremes will occur in the future. When such observations are made, new WMO evaluation committees will be formed to adjudicate these observations,” said Randall Cerveny, rapporteur of Climate and Weather Extremes for WMO.