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Tropical cyclone Freddy, its 2nd hit on Mozambique and Climate Change [1]

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Date: 2023-03-10

After traveling the length of the Indian Ocean, after raking Madagascar and battering Mozambique in February, tropical cyclone Freddy is strengthening and is on track to hit Mozambique for a rare 2nd time on Saturday.

This is the forecasted track over the next few days.

After weakening on Wed, Freddy has strengthened from 55 knots to 70 knots (130 km/h) over the past 24 hours.

Conditions are favorable for further intensification due to warm waters in the Mozambique Channel and moist air feeding the cyclone.

Freddy will be a Cat 2 cyclone during landfall, with sustained winds of 90 knots (167 km/h).

Freddy’s movement has slowed down. Landfall is now expected tomorrow afternoon.

After landfall Freddy is expected to move inland as a very slow pace.

Some models predict Freddy dissipating inland, others predict that Freddy will turn right, loop back towards the open sea and re-intensify, similar to what it did the 1st time it hit Mozambique.

Recent satellite imagery -

x Cyclone #Freddy slows to a crawl, a worst case scenario for Mozambique as more time over warm channel waters combined with decreasing wind shear support further strengthening before landfall and slow forward speed increases flooding potential on land. https://t.co/9QQqmkEnyz pic.twitter.com/FAPLJzf0qS — UW-Madison CIMSS (@UWCIMSS) March 10, 2023

Sea Surface Temperatures in the Mozambique Channel are elevated at this time, averaging over 84F underneath Freddy.

Here is Freddy’s long journey from off the NW coast of Australia to Mozambique over the past 5 weeks.

Some notable records set by Freddy, not the kind of records we need -

Longest-lived tropical cyclone in history

Number of intensifications — more than 6.

Record accumulated cyclone energy for southern hemisphere with the ACE metric exceeding 78.

Here is Freddy’s wacky track over the past 3 weeks (it made landfall in Mozambique on Feb 24) and its projected track over the next few days according to the WMO.

Freddy hammered eastern Madagascar during the last week of Feb, then moved across the Mozambique channel and slammed Mozambique, It then circled back and crossed the channel to cause a bout of heavy rainfall in Madagascar.

There is considerable disagreement on the projected track after landfall among various models.

Damage and Destruction

The death toll across both nations is 21, kept low because of advanced warnings and preparations.

The deluge affected ~213,000 people and destroyed over 28,000 homes in the Mozambican capital of Maputo and nearby provinces, according to Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management. The institute’s website is currently down.

UNICEF has expressed concern that heavy rainfall from the storm that's forecast to hit Malawi could worsen what's already the country's "deadliest cholera outbreak in its recorded history."

x #CycloneFreddy will hit central 🇲🇿 overnight, and is expected to bring widespread damage & flooding.



🚨Since early February, floods have already destroyed thousands of hectares of cropland at the outset of the main harvest, key for families to secure food stocks for the year.🌾 pic.twitter.com/hdaVzAayR8 — WFP Mozambique (@wfp_mozambique) March 10, 2023

Now Freddy is headed towards Zambezia, the second most populous province in Mozambique.

x 🌀 Cyclone #Freddy is expected to make a second landfall in Mozambique tonight or tomorrow morning, and it could later impact Malawi.



At least 27 people have died and 470,000 have already been affected by the storm’s passage in Madagascar and Mozambique.https://t.co/7QJxYBGNmZ pic.twitter.com/kFBUXlTaL0 — OCHA Southern & Eastern Africa (@UNOCHA_ROSEA) March 10, 2023

Freddy’s Future Track

www.metoc.navy.mil/… describes Freddy in this colorful language about the possibility of Freddy looping back to the open sea —

BUT FREDDY IS A LIKE A B-REEL HORROR MOVIE THAT NEVER ENDS AND AS DISCUSSED BELOW, IT MAY NOT STAY OVER LAND FOR LONG. THE ALTERNATE, I AM LEGEND, SCENARIO SEES TC FREDDY DO A U-TURN AFTER MAKING A BRIEF PASSAGE OVER THE COAST OF MOZAMBIQUE, RETURNING TO WATER BY TAU 96 AND QUICKLY REINTENSIFYING. WHILE CONFIDENCE IN THIS SCENARIO REMAINS LOW, WITH INCREASING MODEL GUIDANCE INDICATING A LOOP BACK TO SEA, PROBABILITIES ARE INCREASING.

Freddy and Climate Change

Yes, one should be cautious in connecting an individual storm to Climate Change. But the effects of Climate Change are predictable and observable. Most of the extra heat trapped in the atmosphere due to greenhouse gases gets absorbed by the oceans. Waters in the Indian ocean are warmer than usual this year, not just at the surface but below it as well. Usually, as cyclones traverse the oceans, colder sub-surface water gets pushed towards the surface which acts to dampen cyclone intensity. But when sub-surface waters are warm, cyclones continue to strengthen. We have seen these effects in Hurricanes traversing the Gulf of Mexico, some of which have intensified very rapidly because of warm sub-surface waters.

What lies ahead? +1.5 degrees in 2024?

From yaleclimateconnections.org/… — Over the next year, La Niña, which has been active over the past several years, will give way to its hotter counterpart, El Niño. El Niño brings warm surface waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which affects temperatures, drought, and rainfall around the world. The planet hasn’t seen a strong El Niño since 2016 — the hottest year ever recorded — and the next El Niño will occur on top of all the warming that’s occurred since then.

The world has already warmed an average of 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) since the Industrial Revolution ushered in the widespread use of fossil fuels. Most estimates said 1.5 degrees of warming wouldn’t arrive until at least the early 2030s. The chance that El Niño could push the planet above that mark for the first time, however, has about a 50/50 chance of happening in the next five years, Adam Scaife, the head of long-range prediction at the U.K. Met Office, told the Guardian last month.

x La Niña has ended and #ENSO-neutral conditions are expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere spring and early summer 2023. This is the final #LaNina Advisory for this event. https://t.co/5zlzaZ1aZx pic.twitter.com/dXOLGmOP7I — NWS Climate Prediction Center (@NWSCPC) March 9, 2023

A strong El Niño will bring heat waves, drought and wildfires to many parts of the world, while other regions may experience increased rainfall. Melting of the polar regions and glaciers will accelerate. Sea levels will continue to rise.

If we hit +1.5 C, will it lead to an irreversible chain of events that leads to further global warming? Many climate models say so.

Epilogue

We are far from arresting the rise in global temperatures due to Climate Chance, which is primarily caused by the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. In spite of international agreements, countries continue to make power plants that use coal, oil and gas. The demand for energy keeps rising.

It’s a herculean task to get hundreds of countries and billions of people to change their infrastructure, their energy use and generation and to change their way of life. The difficulty is exponentially higher because a good part of the world is controlled by sociopaths and psychopath billionaires and the political parties under their control, whose sole purpose in life seems to be the accumulation of wealth and the power to control the lives of billions, in the few miserable years they have left on earth. This is true in many countries, not just the U.S.

Is humanity capable of saving earth and itself? We all have hope that it can, we all try to contribute to the solution, but we all have our doubts as well. Time is not on our side.

Further Reading

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/10/2157280/-Tropical-cyclone-Freddy-will-hit-Mozambique-a-2nd-time-and-may-even-loop-back-out-and-reintensify

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