Rare January Atlantic Hurricane

The storm could lead to up to seven inches of rain in isolated areas of the Azores and three to five inches throughout. The center has issued a five-day hurricane warning and tropical storm warnings for various regions of the Azores islands as Hurricane Alex moves north-northeast toward land at 20 miles per hour.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, though that doesn’t mean tropical systems can not pop up at other times. In fact, the last named Atlantic tropical storm was in 1978, and you have to go back to 1938 to find the last storm that became a hurricane during the month.

Positioned 490 miles south of the Azores, Alex is making a beeline towards the group of islands, which sit about 900 miles west of Portugal.

The National Hurricane Center upgraded a storm developing in the Atlantic Ocean to a hurricane, CNN reported Thursday. If the storm follows the current forecast track, its centre will move near or over parts of the Azores Friday morning, NASA said.

Pali, in the central Pacific, is the the earliest hurricane ever recorded over the Central Pacific Basin in a calendar year, forming 19 days earlier than the previous record holder, Hurricane Ekeka of 1992. Sustained winds are estimated to be near 85 mph with tropical force winds extending 150 miles and hurricane force winds extending 25 miles.

Weathermen have described Hurricane Alex as a rare and “weird” storm because it is very abnormal for a Hurricane to form in the North Atlantic ocean in the middle of winter. The heavy rain “could produce life-threatening flash floods and mudslides” and a storm surge is expected to yield substantial coastal flooding. The National Hurricane Center cites an unusually unstable atmosphere within the storm environment as the reason it intensified regardless. Therefore, the first name in the 2016 list, Alex, has now been used.

After that, it’s expected to head toward Greenland.