Pacific Typhoon Season 2014

Halong passing through Kansai now, in Tokyo where we are about 1,000km away from Halong's center, its heavy rain and winds touching 40mph. Meanwhile up north in Aomori a M6.1 struck with heavy shaking in that region. Other than that, a normal day here.

Looks like sudden direction change at Kyushu with Shikoku getting a deluge. Tokyo might get a lot of rain with gale force winds for short time on Monday.

Update -

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/typh5.html has it at 960mb in the Tokyo region, this could get very interesting.

Models are predicting ex-Nuri to become one of the strongest extra-tropical cyclones ever witnessed.

Dr. Jeff Masters has a post about this on Wunderground. This storm may rival the Dutch Harbor low pressure record set in 1977.

The Bering Sea north of the Aleutians is where Deadliest Catch is filmed. I hope all ships out there get the message ... :eek:

12Z GFS bring Ex-Nuri down to an astonishing 911mb.

Doesn't look like the eye of the storm will be near land at its lowest, but from that chart maquiladora posted you can see that the strongest winds are expected on the south side of the storm, closer to the islands.

Ex-Nuri ended up at 924mb. The strongest extra-tropical storm ever observed in the Pacific.

The Philippines are in the firing line again, with Super Typhoon Hagupit heading their way. Wind speeds intensified from 115mph to 150mph (Cat.4) in a 6-hour period today, and it's predicted to hit Cat.5 any time now. This time the typhoon is predicted to "graze" the islands rather than make a head-on landing, but there's still a degree of uncertainty in the prediction.

This is on a track about 50-75 miles north of last year's disastrous typhoon, and almost as strong in terms of wind and tidal surge, however, it also comes right at the full moon which is 6 Dec 1227z. (z = UTC).

If anyone here is communicating with people in the Philippines I am sure their national weather agency will have warnings out but the general idea would be that very severe conditions will spread across most of Samar and the northern and central portions of the Visayan Sea ending with a direct hit on Mindoro. The places that got hit the worst last year will be in a fairly strong wind zone but coming from a westerly direction as was experienced last year in Cebu City (and they got off relatively unscathed). The major damage and risk to life and property with this storm will be in the areas mentioned and somewhat to the north of the zone of greatest damage in Nov 2013. The track will be closer to Manila than last year's super typhoon, and cat-2 conditions may spread in there, but cat-4 high impact can be expected across southern Luzon as well as Mindoro, northern Visayan and Samar.

Philippines are 8 hours ahead of Ireland in time zone so it is now Saturday early morning there. The worst of the storm will hit Saturday night into Sunday across the regions mentioned. Peak gusts of 200 km/hr and storm surges of 5-10 metres could be expected where winds are onshore. Looking at a map, I would say the largest impacts (as with Tacloban last year) would be around Masbate and the southern extremities of Luzon including Megsapi. Hopefully the fact that this storm is just slightly weaker may reduce those impacts but I am fearful of a second disaster of almost similar proportions.