Cyclone Freddy traveled 5,250 miles across the southern Indian Ocean and made a pair of landfalls in Madagascar and Mozambique at the end of February. Now, nearly a month after its formation off the coast of southern Indonesia, Freddy is once again a tropical cyclone in the Mozambique Channel.
Freddy is only one of four tropical cyclones on record that have traveled across the entire southern Indian Ocean, according to NOAA’s historical hurricane tracks database. It peaked at Category 5 hurricane-equivalent intensity during the weekend of Feb. 18-19 – only the 20th tropical cyclone to do so in the South Indian Ocean since 1989.
Cyclone Freddy turned deadly as it crashed ashore in Madagascar on Feb. 21, then continued westward and made a rare landfall in the southern African country of Mozambique on Feb. 24. According to a study published in the journal Weather and Forecasting in October 2004, less than 5% of southern Indian Ocean tropical cyclones make landfall on the eastern coast of southern Africa.
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The remnant circulation of Freddy survived its land interaction with Mozambique, then turned eastward and emerged back over the Mozambique Channel between southern Africa and Madagascar, where it reorganized into a tropical cyclone once again.
And the forecast cone for Cyclone Freddy from the U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center has it strengthening into a hurricane-equivalent cyclone and tracking directly into Mozambique – again – in what will become its third landfall by this weekend. Flooding, damaging winds and storm surge will also be a serious threat to the country barely two weeks after it came ashore the first time.
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Monday marks the 29th day we’ve been tracking Freddy or its remnants since it first became a tropical cyclone on Feb. 6 off the coast of southern Indonesia. That means Cyclone Freddy is quickly approaching the record for the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on Earth, which currently stands at 31 days set by Hurricane/Typhoon John in the Pacific Ocean in 1994.
In terms of Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or ACE – an integrated metric that accounts for the frequency, intensity and duration of tropical cyclones – Freddy is now the all-time record holder for the Southern Hemisphere.
According to Phil Klotzbach, a tropical weather expert at Colorado State University, Freddy surpassed the ACE of Cyclone Fantala in 2016, the previous Southern Hemisphere record holder.
What’s more, Cyclone Freddy generated the most ACE of any tropical cyclone on Earth since Hurricane/Typhoon Ioke in 2006, which was a long-lived and intense storm that tracked across the Central and Western Pacific Ocean, peaking at Category 5 intensity during its 17-day journey.
As of Monday, Freddy’s ACE stood at 70.8 units, only 14.5 ACE units away from breaking the world record of 85.3 ACE units currently held by Hurricane/Typhoon Ioke.
Freddy’s ACE even surpassed that of Hurricane Irma in 2017, Klotzbach noted.
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The only two Atlantic hurricanes with a higher lifetime ACE than Cyclone Freddy were Hurricane Three in 1899 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004.