We Actually Managed To Get Tropical Storm Arlene Out In The Atlantic

The swirls clouds in the center of this satellite photo of a
lot of clouds in the North Atlantic is Tropical Storm Arlene,
which was expected to get absorbed into the rest of the
clouds and dissipate later Friday. 

The other day, I told you about a subtropical storm trying to get going way out in the Atlantic Ocean.

It did, and did something I told you was highly unlikely: It turned into a pure tropical storm.

Yep, Tropical Storm Arlene was spinning way out in the Atlantic Ocean early Friday morning, way northwest of the Azores and way northeast of Bermuda.  It had sustained winds of 50 mph.

It joins Ana in 2003 as the only tropical storms known to have formed in the Atlantic in April.

Arlene is also the furthest north a tropical storm was found in the Atlantic this early in the season.

That doesn't mean it never happened before. Arlene was a tiny little thing embedded in a big area of storminess in the North Atlantic.

Before, say, 1970, when satellites really started taking pictures of the Earth's clouds from above, little tropical storms like this would almost surely have gone undetected.

Who knows? There might have been many April tropical storms that we never knew about.

Subtropical storms, as I mentioned the other day, are hybrids between storms with warm cores, and regular storms, that have cold upper level cores along with cold and warm fronts.

Arlene managed to transition to a warm core storm, but a lame one.

That's because it's core is indeed warmer than its surroundings, but its surroundings are cold. Water temperatures beneath Arlene are a little under 70 degrees. Usually you need water temperatures several degrees warmer than that at least to sustain a tropical storm. '

In any event, Arlene will get sucked up into the other storminess around it today and cease to exist. It poses no threat to any land areas.