At a Glance
- Tropical Storm Alex brought strong winds to Bermuda, Florida, and Cuba.
- Alex formed on Sunday from the same tropical disturbance that soaked Florida.
Tropical Storm Alex brought flooding rains and damaging winds to Florida, Bermuda and Cuba before becoming a post tropical system in the Atlantic.
The first named storm of the Atlantic season formed early Sunday morning while located well to the east of Florida's Peninsula. It developed from the same disturbance that soaked South Florida with flooding rainfall Friday into Saturday.
The disturbance produced rainfall totals in excess of a foot in southeast Florida, including the Miami metro area, where flooding reports were numerous early Saturday. The top total was 14.85 inches in Hollywood.
In Cuba, heavy downpours from the system caused landslides and accidents that left two people dead in the capital, Havana, the Associated Press reported.
See the link below for more details on the impacts the system caused.
(LATEST: Flooding in Florida, Cuba)
The disturbance failed to become a tropical storm prior to moving inland across Florida. That's because strong winds aloft and dry air kept it from organizing a well-defined area of low pressure with collocated rain and thunderstorm activity.
Instead, the disturbance crossed Florida as Potential Tropical Cyclone One. This naming procedure allows the National Hurricane Center to issue advisories, watches and warnings and a forecast path for a system that hasn't yet developed but poses a threat of tropical-storm-force winds to land areas within 48 hours.
It's a good example of how a weak tropical system can still bring significant impacts in the form of flooding rainfall.
The disturbance then organized into Tropical Storm Alex once it left Florida and was located over the open southwest Atlantic waters.
An elevated weather station in Bermuda clocked a wind gust up to 67 mph early Monday as Alex's center passed north of the archipelago. Alex will transition into a non-tropical low-pressure sure system later Monday. A buoy at Crescent Reef, just north of Bermuda, reported a sustained wind of 55 mph and a gust to 72 mph Monday morning.
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