Hurricane Alex - Rare January North Atlantic Storm

[Simon Culling]

Earlier in January a rare north Atlantic hurricane formed to the south of the Azores islands and moved slowly north hitting the western side of the islands as a tropical storm a couple of days ago. This is only the fourth time since 1851 that a hurricane has formed in the north Atlantic in January. A couple of links below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Alex_(2016)

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMa ... landfall-i

It appears have had an impact on model output with anything beyond 3-4 days keeps changing.

[Simon Culling]

Some good figures in this link:

http://www.weather.com/storms/hurricane ... ean-azores

And at the ever reliable CIMSS:

http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/blog/archives/20483

Alex transformed into an extratropical depression late Friday and merged with another low to the south of Greenland. It will be interesting to see how this area of warm humid air affects the weather over the UK in the coming week.

[NZstorm]

The sea surface temps around the azores are 15C. So the storm would have been under the influence of jet stream divergence to maintain its strength. Thanks for the links.

[Simon Culling]

When reviewing the development of this system NOAA noted that SST's were around 20*C in the formative stage and upper-tropospheric temperatures were estimated to be around -60*C, which is significantly colder than the tropical mean. The resulting instability was likely to have the main factor contributing to the tropical transition and intensification of Alex.

It is interesting that it maintained some form as it moved over the lower SST's as it approached the Azores.