The image is from Google Earth, and the yellow figure is Tropical Depression #13, the orange to the lower right is tropical storm Katia, and the red in the center near the top is an extratropical storm 450 miles southeast of Nova Scotia forming in a place in the ocean we do not usually expect such things.
Extratropical storms rely on the release of energy when cold and warm air interact, and not upon the heat of the surface water of the ocean, as the more familiar tropical storms (cyclonic storms) do.
I include a picture from October 2010 of an extratropical which formed over the USA:
Meteorologists get excited about the storm because it set a record for the lowest pressure (not associated with a hurricane) measured over land in the continental United States.
I don't recall the storm - we have so many of them here - but I find it interesting that we are in the "black swan" area of the normal distribution again; we might not be seeing more storms, but we are finding that the averages are shifting towards the extremes, and what used to be very unusual is now merely a bit odd.
Think about it: we have experienced many "black swan" or statistical outliers over the past 3 years, not only in weather, but in our everyday affairs. Now certain presidential candidates would say that a bunching up of the data towards the outlier area of the normal distribution means that God sez we should vote for Bachmann. I won't go that far, but it does give one pause.
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