The weather guy on a Toronto TV station just now breathlessly announced that Tropical Storm Edouard, out there in the Atlantic, was a record breaker. It was -- wait for it -- the earliest ever fifth named storm for any Atlantic hurricane season. Seems like a pretty obscure record, but there we are.
Thing is, the previous four named storms haven't amounted to much, certainly not to anything like a hurricane. One of the four, Bertha, formed in the Pacific, crossed over Central America into the Caribbean and stayed active just long enough for NOAA to give it a name before it headed onshore and petered out. The other three (Arthur, Cristobal and Dolly) formed in the Atlantic but barely had time to get christened before quite literally going off the radar. The NOAA meteorologists have predicted an above-average hurricane season this year: giving every thundercloud a name is certainly one way to ensure they're right!
You can scroll through the NOAA website to find out all about Edouard. It was given a name (thus becoming the "earliest ever fifth named storm") when it was located about 36 degrees north of the equator. It's a long time since I studied geography, but I'm close to 100 percent sure that's a very long way north of the tropics. And check out the location -- the nearest land is the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, where icebergs are a much more common sight than hurricanes.
This may well turn out to be an above-average hurricane season -- there are two more possible candidates out there even now -- but I'm not sure NOAA is doing anyone any favours by crying wolf so much. Serious suggestion: a depression that doesn't build up to the required windspeed until it moves out of the tropics really should not be called a tropical storm. Or here's an alternative rule: if a storm forms near St. John's, Antigua it could be a tropical storm; if it forms near St.John's, Newfoundland, it definitely isn't!
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