Since berta is 'upon us' in a way that really shouldn't sound that over dramatic, I'd like to draw attention to another example of a (real) tropical storm that, to my mind, is pretty remarkable. That storm is cyclone Agni (November 2004), the only known tropical storm ever to 'cross over'*

It should be immediately apparant what is amazing about this storm. Agni is sitting pretty much on the equator. The invest formed offshort of somalia and actually hit somalia before moving NW into the arabian sea. The storm was in a favourable environment given the circumstances including low wind sheer and high SSTs. However the most remarkable thing about this storm is that it actually crossed the equator* into the southern hemisphere becoming bizarely an 'anticyclonic tropical storm'. The peak intensity of the storm was a good 10mph over Hurricane cat 1 equivalent, so it wasn't strong to speak of however it was a fully fledged tropical storm. Now there is nothing that actually prevents a hurricane or tropical storm from residing on the equator, it just cannot form there, because there is no fictitous force (coriolis force) there to generate rotation. Once a cyclone forms it also tends to move away from the equator due to an 'interaction between their own rotation and the earths'. So to get an equator moving away from the poles you already need an external force, so having a hurricane forming close enough to the equator and then move over it becomes extremely unlikely. Ofc when the cyclone crosses the equator there is literally no coriolis force, but the hurricane can keep rotating in the direction it started of even if the coriolois force acts in the wrong direction after a crossing.

So this is sort of a mythbusting post. Tropical cyclones can affect the equator! 

*there is some dispute about this, no consensus seems to have been reached but if it didn't cross the equator it came extremely close.