Cyclone Freddy, a Long-Term Threat to Madagascar
Cyclone Freddy has intensified back into a category 3 storm, staging a long-term threat to Madagascar. Freddy’s eye once again appeared in infrared radar, as the hot tower at the northern quadrant wraps up shear to fix its weak southeast quadrant. Force Thirteen’s 12Z analysis locates the storm’s center at 15.3 degrees South and 89.9 degrees East, moving west at 18 kilometers per hour. And as for the storm’s intensity, it is estimated to have wind speeds of 115mph under the high consensus of T5.5 estimate in subjective Dvorak, and its pressure is estimated at 960 hPa based on the Courtney-Knaff-Zehr wind-pressure relationship. Moving on to the storm system’s location, Freddy was located approximately 1690 miles away from Carnarvon, 1830 miles from Geraldton, and 2000 miles from Perth. There are no alerts currently active as of now regarding Cyclone Freddy.
After about 5 days, it is expected that Cyclone Freddy will generate swells towards Madagascar and Mauritius due to Freddy’s outer circulation, which rough areas pose threat to water activities nearshore. The sea surface temperatures around Freddy are getting warmer to around 28 degrees Celsius, which favors further development in the next few days. And by the JTWC forecast cone, it is expected that Freddy will become a 110kt (205km/h) Category 3 system after a few days, though based on recent rapid development, it could intensify significantly in short order.
Moving on towards models prediction on Freddy, models have a high consensus in its track under stern westward steering current from the subtropical ridge, while the trough-ridge interaction next week remains a major uncertainty based on ECMWF and GFS which the turn determines whether Freddy will strike Madagascar or not later next week.
We advise residents of the aforementioned areas to watch the development of Cyclone Freddy as uncertainty still looms over the system.
This article is written by Dino Wun and formatted by Kenneth Chan.
