Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Typhoon Season

So, Typhoon Season is well and truly upon us.

Normally I just rely on Tropical Storm Risk to track the many typhoons that seem to be headed our way, although history tells us that any typhoon on a westerly track that is predicted to hit Hangzhou in 3 or more days time will actually veer to the south and hit Taiwan instead before going to Fujian province.

So, a couple of years ago (not having a lot of typhoon experience growing up in the UK) I'd have been concerned that the forecast was for Typhoon Saomai to hit just below Hangzhou and Typhoon (only just) Maria to hit Osaka. Given that I'm going from Hangzhou to Osaka for Summer Sonic on Friday that would have been bad!

As it was many times last year, so it is with Typhoon Saomai which was supposed to hit Ningbo (just south of Hangzhou) but has now veered south and is going to clip Taiwan before hitting Fujian. Worryingly, they were predicting it as a Cat 2/3 yesterday and it's now already a Cat 5.

Looking for a decent photo to post I came across this NASA Earth Observatory website which has a wide variety of beautiful satellite shots of the Earth, with annotations, including this one of the three active typhoon systems in the Pacific:


Looks pretty from above...

1 comment:

HistoryElephant said...

Sounds like famous last words to me.

I'm flying to America (from the UK) on Tuesday.

Ha! We laugh in the face of fear and tweak the nose of the dreadful spindly killer fish.