Cyclone Freddy, which has twice smashed into the African coast after traversing the Indian Ocean, may be enshrined in the history books as the longest ever documented, meteorologists say.
The storm began to brew in early February in the southeastern Indian Ocean off northern Australia, whose weather service gave it the designation of Freddy on February 6.
The French weather service Meteo-France describes Freddy as a"particularly powerful and compact tropical system, generating extreme winds near its core". Last week it unofficially broke the World Meteorological Organization's benchmark as the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record, set in 1994 for a 31-day storm named John.
Major storms in the Indian Ocean are known as cyclones, as typhoons in the Pacific and hurricanes in the Atlantic.Experts are cautious about whether Freddy can be specifically linked to climate change, a phenomenon that is measured over the long term rather than on single events, but say it is consistent with predictions.
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