Sad sack of clouds becomes Atlantic's first named storm of 2025

A center of low pressure over the north-central Atlantic Ocean earned the distinction of becoming the basin's first named tropical system of the year on Tuesday.

After several days of playing "will it, won't it," the system displayed enough thunderstorm activity near the center of the storm to qualify as Tropical Storm Andrea.

The National Hurricane Center wrote in their forecast discussion: "Even though deep convection is now decreasing, due to the persistent convection overnight and pulsing convection over the past 36 hours, the system has met the criteria of being classified as a tropical storm, albeit a marginal one, making Tropical Storm Andrea the first Atlantic storm of the year."

That's meteorologist-ese for "it's a sad sack of clouds." Andrea will remain out to sea and should fall apart by Wednesday morning.

Climatologically speaking, the Atlantic's first named storm usually forms around June 20th, so we're only a few days behind on that front. The heart of the season remains a long way off—activity usually ramps up in August before reaching its peak during the second week of September.

Seasonal outlooks published by both NOAA and Colorado State University call for an above-average season across the Atlantic in the weeks and months ahead. These forecasts are based on warmer-than-usual ocean waters, an uptick in monsoon activity over western Africa, and a lack of El Niño conditions in the Pacific Ocean.

Make sure you're prepared for hurricane season well before a storm forms—whether you're on the coast or hundreds of miles inland.

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Subtropical Storm Forms Near Bermuda, 2019 Hurricane Season Starts in May. (Again.)

Subtropical Storm Andrea formed southwest of Bermuda on Monday. The appearance of a named storm in the Atlantic means this basin's hurricane season has started before June 1 for the seventh time in the last decade. Andrea will be weak and short-lived, posing no threat to land.

This storm forming while everyone is paying attention to the severe weather over the Plains is the atmospheric equivalent of a Friday night news dump. Most people will never know it existed, and the rest will forget about it soon enough. Subtropical Storm Andrea will probably dissipate by early Wednesday morning without affecting land. The storm's remnants could bring showers to Bermuda by the middle of the week, but that's about it as far as impacts are concerned.

A subtropical storm is a low-pressure system that shares both tropical and extratropical characteristics. It's tropical-like. It forms and acts like a tropical cyclone, and carries the same impacts as a tropical cyclone, but it's not fully warm throughout the system and it derives some of its energy from upper-level winds. A fully tropical cyclone would be warm from top to bottom and the thunderstorms near the center of the storm would completely drive its formation and maintenance.

We're almost to the point where you can wager money on a named storm forming before June 1 and wind up winning the bet. This is the seventh hurricane season since 2009, and the fifth season in a row, that we've seen at least one named storm form in the "pre-season."

I argued a few weeks ago that we should move the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season up a few weeks into May. Not only would moving up the start of the season to, say, May 15, which would sync it up with eastern Pacific's season, but it would start the awareness campaigns a little earlier than they run right now. That'd be helpful for coastal residents, seeing as several of these "pre-season" storms, like Alberto in 2018, wound up making landfall in the United States.

The tropics should fall quiet again for a while after Andrea dissipates.

[Top Image: RAMMB/CIRA]

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