ROUGH WATERS AHEAD

Rapid intensification and unpredictable movement of tropical cyclones in recent years may form a template for future storm systems

- AKSHIT SANGOMLA

CYCLONE FREDDY, which battered six African countries for over two weeks, in a what the UN InPanel on Climate way demonstrates Intergovernmental Change (IPCC) warns of in its Synthesis Report. The report notes "intensification of tropical cyclones and/or extratropical storms" due to global warming. This is exactly how Freddy behaved, prompting the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to say that its repeated intensification, long track and impact may have broken many records. On March 10, just after Freddy swirled in the southern Indian Ocean to make its third landfall, Sebastien Langlade, head of operations at WMO's regional centre for Réunion, called it an "exceptional phenomenon".

Freddy formed over the ocean in an area north of Australia on February 4 and moved west, making three landfalls in Africa before dissipating on March 15. Vineet Kumar Singh, research scientist at the Typhoon Research Center, Jeju National University in South Korea, calculates its lifetime to be 37 days, the most in the world on record.