Cyclone Freddy Heading Back to Mozambique

According to weather warnings, tropical Cyclone Freddy is expected to make landfall in Mozambique for the second time on Friday, 10 March.

The United Nations’ monitoring station has warned that the storm – which hit Madagascar earlier this week on Monday, 6 March – will “gradually intensify to the stage of a tropical cyclone, or even an intense tropical cyclone” before it makes landfall in Zambezia, off the coast of Mozambique.

Some estimates believe that Freddy – which first developed on Monday off the northwest Australian coast – has broken the world record for the longest-lasting storm.

Currently, the longest-lasting official storm on record is Hurricane John (also known as Typhoon John) which lasted 31 days in 1994 as it travelled between Hawaii, Johnston Island, and Alaska in the United States of America.

An official investigation into whether the time record has been broken will be launched once the storm has dissipated.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Freddy has also broken Southern Hemisphere records for the highest “accumulated cyclone energy.”

Since the cyclone first struck the east coast of Africa, there have been 21 deaths in Madagascar and Mozambique together while torrential rain, destructive winds and flooding have destroyed homes and affected nearly 2 million people across the region.

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