Hurricane Leslie came barreling ashore overnight near Lisbon, Portugal.
Portugal, you’re asking?!?
Yes. Storms generally form along the western coast of the African continent and move to the west across the Atlantic Ocean. We in Houston are very familiar with that pattern, and the spaghetti lines of projected paths.
Uncharacteristically, oddly, Leslie meandered around the ocean as a slow moving tropical storm before making a U-turn and heading to the European continent, gaining strength and moving ashore overnight with 109 mile an hour winds, uprooting more than a thousand trees and causing localized flooding. In all of recorded history, and they've been recording history for a long time, the Iberian Peninsula has only had five storms make landfall.
Hurricane Ophelia was another odd one in 2017, winding up in Ireland.
Are weather patterns changing?