from the at-least-there-is-some-warning dept.
Multiple sources report that Super Typhoon Souledor, which is currently projected to develop into a class 5 typhoon, is set to make landfall over the eastern coast of China on Friday night, August 7th. A super typhoon is defined as a typhoon with winds in excess of 150 mph/241 km/h. On August 4th, around 06:00 UTC (2:00 AM EDT/2:00 PM CST¹) Souledor was 1162 miles/1870 km east-southeast of Taipei and moving at a speed of 12 mph/20 km/h in a west-northwestly direction.
Late Saturday night, Soudelor, which was a class 1 typhoon at the time, devastated Saipan. (Google Maps link for those of us who are a bit fuzzy on our Pacific island geography.) The Huffington Post writes:
After conditions subsided Monday morning, Ralph Torres, acting governor for the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, declared "a state of disaster and significant emergency" for Saipan, the largest island of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Most of Saipan is currently without water and power, according to local news stations. Officials do not know when it will be restored.
An estimated 350 people had been placed in emergency shelters, and at least 60 people are being treated for lacerations as of Monday, August 3rd local time.
Weather Underground provides more in-depth data and information about previous typhoons in 2015. More information about tropical cyclone scales is available on Wikipedia.
¹ China Standard Time
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The 2015 El Niño event is now neck-and-neck with [the] record-setting event of 1997-1998 in terms of its mid-summer intensity.
Chart shows sea surface temperature difference from average (in degrees Celsius) in central and eastern Tropical Pacific in 2015 (orange line) compared to 1997 (blue line). By definition, El Nino becomes established when the sea surface temperature difference from average in this region is 0.5 Celsius for at least one month. It becomes a moderate El Nino event at 1 degree Celsius, strong at 1.5 degrees, and very strong or "super" at 2 degrees. In mid-July 2015, the sea surface temperature difference from normal was around 1.5 degrees, on the cusp of a strong El Nino event and comparable to the 1997 event at the same time, which eventually became a super El Nino. The red dots represent the average model forecast for the rest of 2015 which shows the sea surface temperature difference from average climbing above 2 degrees, achieving super El Nino strength, but it is not forecast to be quite as strong as the 1997-1998 event .
Good news: lots of rain on the way to drought-stricken California. Bad news: mudslides.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @10:28AM
Oh no!!! How does this disaster affect the American Dream of selling cheap plastic crap to idiots??!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 05 2015, @11:38AM
I'm sure it sucks, but this is just clickbait. I'm vaguely familiar with Saipan and the numbers we're talking about are around 1% of the population, aka 99% are not in shelters.
Yeah yeah it sucks but the article reads like the Dresden firebombing or being at ground zero at Hiroshima. Careful reading shows its like a REALLY bad thunderstorm in the midwest, like worst for a generation, which coincidentally is about the same windspeed.
Wonder if there were embedded tornados. Some cars are just sitting in their parking spots like a weak drizzle blew thru, a handful look tossed around tornado style.
Now is the time to be careful, people tend not to get killed directly by the storm, but at least in the rural north most of the deaths are bubba is really tired from working 36 hours straight and he makes a dumb chainsaw mistake that would never happen normally and suddenly his chainsaw kills him. Most tetanus shots are people trying to clean up, not hurt during the storm, ditto lacerations. People get used to self-treatment for very mild heat exhaustion like chilling in front of the AC with couple quarts of ice water for a few hours in normal life, that doesn't work in a huge cleanup project with no electricity so instead they simply die of heat stroke. I'm just saying from experience that more people die in the week after the storm while the sun is out and its "nice" than die during the storm itself. So yeah 60 people in the hospital because of the storm, but before the weeks out there's gonna be 600 hospital visits from picking up broken glass, infected cuts, etc. "I thought that power line was dead" and stuff like that.
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday August 05 2015, @05:32PM
I have managed to experience a typhoon at least once every year for about 8 years in a row in both China and Japan, but never managed to see one that was more impressive than a decent storm in Europe. Just like most people never experience an earthquake bad enough to crawl under the table for.
But the thing with such events is that sometimes, in some place, they do turn into something really dangerous, and then a lot of people tend to die. Somehow people seem to like fearing (or maybe just hearing) this, and thus clicking such news.
I do not mind occasionally discussing things like a storm (even if its not that bad) on SN, as long as we are not going to talk about the weather all the time...
(Score: 3, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:18PM
Ah, crap. I managed to butcher the name of the typhoon twice in the body! Sorry, folks! Soudelor is correct.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:24PM
Taiwan issues land warning as Typhoon Soudelor nears island [smh.com.au]. According to Weather Underground, Soudelor (checks spelling!) has winds at 110 mph gusting 135 mph, which means it's entering category 3.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday August 08 2015, @03:28PM
Relief efforts for Saipan: Weather Underground [wunderground.com]
6 killed in Taiwan, Chinese National Meteorological Center issues orange warning: Weather.com [weather.com]
4 dead in Taiwan due to mudslide: The Guardian [theguardian.com]
Images from Taiwan and China: The Wall Street Journal [wsj.com]