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00:00Valerie, French weather services have described the cyclone as exceptional.
00:05Can you give us a sense of how the storm progressed and what made it so powerful?
00:10Well, Chido is the most intense cyclone on record to make landfall on the archipelago.
00:17My yacht hasn't seen a cyclone of this intensity since 1934.
00:23And so it hit the island as a Category 4 cyclone with winds reaching 226 kilometers per hour on Saturday.
00:33That is the maximum speed recorded by French weather services before, you know, connections.
00:39The data was cut off by the passage of the cyclone.
00:43Waves of up to six meters high were also recorded on the island.
00:49And the storm, though, started out as a relatively small cyclone north of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, according to meteorologists,
00:59with winds extending over a distance of only 50 to 100 kilometers.
01:04And then it quickly intensified before reaching the archipelago of Mayotte.
01:10And so what happened is this.
01:12The eye of the cyclone really traveled over Mayotte.
01:17And so that is what made it so exceptional.
01:20You know, French weather services say it is highly unlikely.
01:24I mean, the probability of the eye of a cyclone actually going over such a small area is quite rare.
01:32And so the fact that it did, you know, made the storm so devastating with the images that we have seen in the trail of destruction.
01:40The small, compact size of the cyclone also contributed to its intensity because the energy derived from a warm ocean was concentrated over such a small area over Mayotte.
01:55Now, as you and I know, the region is no stranger to cyclones.
01:58But what do we know about the role of climate change in this storm in particular?
02:04It certainly sounds like it's a big part of it.
02:06Well, I mean, the storm was certainly supercharged by a warm ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean.
02:13You know, climate scientists have recorded exceptionally high temperatures over the last few years, especially this year.
02:22Now, in the Indian Ocean, which surface ocean temperatures close to 30 degrees, but also very warm, deep waters.
02:30And so that's what you're seeing now in red, you know, areas around Madagascar and the coast of Africa and Mayotte in between, you know, really high temperatures.
02:43You know, this creates a very large reservoir of energies for not only cyclones to develop, but also to become very intense.
02:51And so warm ocean temperatures can lead to more evaporation, more moisture in the atmosphere.
02:57And that is really what's giving making this cyclone so powerful.
03:01Does it actually mean that we can make the direct link as of today between the cyclone and climate change?
03:08It's not that simple. Obviously, it'll take months for scientists to really pour through the data, the climate models to really come to that firm conclusion that we know whether this cyclone was made several times more intense or more frequent because of climate change.
03:26Now, we have seen over the last few years scientists being able to come to that scientific conclusion more quickly with what we call rapid attribution science reports.
03:39You know, that being said, I mean, there's no doubt that there is a pattern with warm ocean temperatures.
03:45And, you know, last interesting thing that I wanted to mention, again, according to French Weather Services, they had predicted a higher than normal cyclone activity during the season from November to April with at least 13 cyclones for the whole season.
04:05Valerie, thank you for that.