From: "Mark A. Lander"
To: tropical-storms@tstorms.org

TC Group,

    There is now a tropical storm in the western North Pacific (see
attached IR image at 1230 UTC 28 FEB 2002)..

     March TCs are uncommon, but not out-of-the-question.  During 1959-97
 the distribution looks like this:

     JAN  FEB  MAR  APR  MAY
      22   11   23   29   48

 Although the new TC in the WNP formed in February, I think that by JTWC
 rules that if it formed within the last two days of a particular month and
 then continued on into the next month for longer than two days, then it
 would get assigned to the next month (i.e., March in this case).

     The next name is Mitag.

     Methinks the next El Nino is brewing.  Early onset of the monsoon in
 Micronesia and early season typhoons are one of its best bellweathers.
 Ominously, the most prolific March in the WNP was March 1982 with 2 TYs
 and 1 TS.

     Check out the obs for Chuuk:  Gusts to 46 kts, MSLP 999 mb, and ~7
inches of rain in the last 24 hours.

     Best Regards,  Mark Lander

John McBride

Mark,

Interestingly this TC developed as part of the twin vortices from an n = 1
equatorially trapped Rossby wave..... I discussed this yesterday in our
internal Weather Bureau synoptic_discussion... see my web-page (link
below), synoptic_discussion, yesterday's date.

Now we have available easily accessible large scale real-time
tropical analyses, we see more and more of these TC's developeing from
equatorially trapped Rossby-waves.  I have often wondered about TC genesis
climatologies and the fact that the North West PAC stands out as having
developments at all times of year, including the northern winter.... Could
this fact be largely due to the fact that the time of maximum equatorial
westerly bursts (and so of maximum frequency of n=1 thinamijiggs) is also
during the northen winter?
 
cheers

JMcB