In a statement on Saturday, Malawi Red Cross said it had activated its early response teams in southern Malawi to prepare for the cyclone.

Earlier in the week, Freddy’s longevity and baffling trajectories caused the UN weather agency to set up a committee to determine whether it has broken the record as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone in recorded history after traversing more than 8000 kilometres in the southern Indian Ocean.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Freddy has already catapulted into the record books for the second highest accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE, a measurement of a cyclone’s energy over time.

Freddy is “the third storm on record to last more than 22 days”, said NOAA’s Carl Schreck. Hurricane John in 1994 and an unnamed Atlantic hurricane in 1899 are the other two. The natural weather event La Nina and a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, or a change of temperatures over the ocean, “may have produced ocean temperatures and atmospheric circulations that made an event like this more likely”, Schreck added.

Any storm that can remain at such a “strong intensity for so long and make two landfalls is important in terms of human impacts and in terms of science”, said Kristen Corbosiero, professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University of Albany.

“Intense storms generally go through a series of eyewall replacement cycles and intensity fluctuations,” where the cyclone begins to develop a new eye, Corbosiero said. “But Freddy didn’t have these cycles for most of its life cycle. Trying to understand why, will be a good research topic.”

AP

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