El Niño Fingerprints All Over TS Pena

The Pacific has been a record-setting tropical cyclone factory all season, but the last two weeks have been relatively quiet. Now there's one more El Niño-connected rarity spinning over open water, well southwest of Hawaii. Tropical Storm Pena is the first November named storm to form in the Central Pacific in over 40 years, the first since Hurricane Iwa formed in 1982 and went on to rake Kauai.

Pena is only the fourth November named storm on record in the basin, joining Iwa and others from 1957 and 1972. All three prior November Central Pacific storms came in strong to very strong El Niño years. Spotlighting the connection is the water Pena is sitting over. Sea surface temperatures along its track are running 26 to 27 Celsius, right at the threshold tropical cyclones need, in a part of the Pacific and a month where that shouldn't be true. Warm water where it doesn't belong is the El Niño signature in this basin.

The season officially runs through November 30, and more storms are possible. In the Eastern Pacific, anything forming now would likely be close to Mexico and short-lived. Worth noting: in 1997, Paka wasn't named until December 2, after the season closed. Then it became a 160-knot super typhoon after crossing the dateline.