Weird Weather

A Tropical Storm North of the Equator

In January, the lion's share of Earth's tropical cyclones are south of the equator, in the summer hemisphere, with the exception of the western North Pacific basin, where typhoons can occur year-round. You don't see many January tracks north of the equator east of the international date line in the Pacific Ocean. Until January 2016, that is. Pali became the earliest Central Pacific tropical storm of record on January 7, well southwest of Hawaii. This was thanks to a burst of abnormal westerly low-level winds near or just south of the equator, coupled with the typical northeasterly trade winds of the subtropics north of the equator, providing a broad area of spin in which, once thunderstorms consolidated, a tropical storm formed. Pali is only the third January tropical storm of record in central Pacific records dating to 1949.