Cristobal was the latest example of the weird looping, and sometimes stalling, paths that tropical storms and hurricanes can sometimes take.

Many tropical cyclones follow very clear tracks – for example, a curve around the south and west sides of the Bermuda-Azores high in the Atlantic Basin, or just a straight buzzsaw through the Caribbean Sea.

In these cases, the atmosphere's steering flow is strong and persistent enough to keep the hurricane on a steady path. Forecast tracks of those are relatively straightforward.

Then, you have the others like Cristobal.

It was a painfully slow path since it formed as Tropical Depression Three on June 1 and then made landfall in Mexico on June 3. The storm's circulation center moved in a looping pattern westward, and then southward into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, as depicted in the image above. Cristobal then finally began to turn north over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on June 5.

The explanation for why these looping or stalling paths happen is straightforward: steering currents in the atmosphere.

In these cases, the steering winds in the upper atmosphere are weak and provide little to no influence on where a storm tracks. A change in the weather pattern is needed in order for a storm to make steady forward progress.

We've seen this happen with other storms in recent years, most notably Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Harvey slammed into the Texas coast just north of Corpus Christi as a Category 4 hurricane the night of Aug. 25, 2017, then hovered for days across southeastern Texas, leading to the heaviest and most widespread tropical cyclone rain event on record in U.S. history.

The stall was the result of Harvey being caught between a large area of high pressure in the western U.S. and another area of high pressure extending from the western Atlantic Ocean into the Gulf of Mexico.

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