Prepare yourselves for the second coming of Katrina, because you can bet that this storm will be hyped as an indicator of “global warming”.
As of this writing, the storm is in the process of making landfall in the Philippines and it is moving west at 20-25 knots and estimated winds of 170 knots (195mph).
Hurricane expert Dr. Ryan Maue has been monitoring the Super Typhoon for the past several days and remarked about the historic nature of Haiyan. In this upper echelon of cyclone intensity, it is difficult to assign rankings or compare Typhoons due to inhomogeneous observing networks and tools. But it’s fair to say that Super Typhoon Haiyan is as intense as a tropical cyclone can get.
Presented at AMS Tropical in 2004, Hoarau et al. asked if there were any Typhoons stronger than Tip (1979). Two likely candidates emerged including Super Typhoon Angela from 1995 which has been compared with today’s storm. Satellite estimates through Dvorak technique yielded an intensity of 90 m/s or 175 knots which is greater than Tip’s maximum of 165 knots. A quick comparison between Angela and Haiyan at maximum intensity suggests the latter is actually stronger. Dvorak estimates are at the top of the scale — T = 8.0 and even touched 8.1, which according to this chart, means 170-knot maximum 1-minute sustained winds. That is Category 5 with three pluses.
The actual best-tracks have Tip at 165-knots and there are many others that exceeded 155-knots. Here’s a handy list of advisories that met or exceeded 155 since 1950. The JTWC best tracks are increasingly uncertain prior to the satellite era (1979) but there is some confidence primarily due to routine aircraft recon from 1944-1987 in the Western Pacific. Aside from field studies (e.g. TPARC) run by NASA in coordination with neighboring nations, routine hurricane hunting does not occur outside of the Western Hemisphere.
Global landfalls were discussed in a recent J. Climate paper by Weinkle, Maue and Pielke Jr. Weinkle_2012.04
![vis0[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/vis01.jpg?quality=83)
Above: as morning breaks in the Philippines, one of the first two visible satellite images
Above: animation from IntelliWeather.com showing the last 12 hours of motion as of 1PM PST 11/7/13. – may take up to a minute to load and animate, depending on your connection speed.
With winds like that, expect to see complete devastation as it makes landfall. That of course will be hyped into an AGW caused storm, just like Katrina. Al Gore and Bill McKibben are already testing lies language on Twitter. Bear in mind that we have a very short historical record of Typhoon strength, and any claims that this is the strongest storm ever need to be qualified with that fact. Nobody has any credible record of typhoon strength back more than a few decades.
I’ll add updates and additional content to this article today – Anthony
===============================================================
UPDATE1: NOAA image as Haiyan prepares to make landfall:
UPDATE2: Haiyan is expected to make it all the way to China. Maue on Twitter:
12z ECMWF model shows #Haiyan maintaining deep central pressure of 947 mb as it moves quickly west thru S. China Sea
UPDATE3: Radar image from Cebu City shows the eye of Haiyan approaching, click image for animation:
UPDATE4: Dr. Heidi Cullen of Climate Central wins the “First Haiyan BS award” with this missive.
RT @NOAA: What's fueling #SuperTyphoon #Haiyan's intensity? Deep warm water: http://t.co/tfNWljssms Via @NOAASatellites #climate
— Heidi Cullen (@HeidiCullen) November 7, 2013
As Bob Tisdale observes, there’s nothing to support this along the track of Haiyan:
Lots of the typical BS accumulating already about Typhoon Haiyan. Let’s push some of it aside and present the sea surface temperature anomalies for the early portion of Haiyan’s storm track.
There was nothing unusually warm about the sea surface temperature anomalies for the early portion of Typhoon Haiyan’s storm track last week, the week of Wednesday October 30, 2013. We’ll have to wait for Monday to see what the values were for this week.
UPDATE5: Jeff Masters, makes this claim:
Super Typhoon Haiyan has made landfall. According to PAGASA, Haiyan came ashore at 4 am local time (20 UTC) November 7, 2013 near Guiuan, on the Philippine island of Samar. At the time, Guiuan reported sustained 10-minute average winds of 96 mph, with a pressure of 977 mb. Contact has since been lost with the city. Two hours before landfall, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center assessed Haiyan’s sustained winds at 195 mph, gusting to 235 mph, making it the 4th strongest tropical cyclone in world history. Satellite loops show that Haiyan weakened only slightly, if at all, in the two hours after JTWC’s advisory, so the super typhoon likely made landfall with winds near 195 mph. This makes Haiyan the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in world history. The previous record was held by the Atlantic’s Hurricane Camille of 1969, which made landfall in Mississippi with 190 mph winds.
Sorry, no. Super Typhoon Ida in 1958 is said to have central pressure of 877mb and 200 mph 1 minute sustained winds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_%281958%29
C. L. Jordan (September 1959). “A Reported Sea Level Pressure of 877 MB.” (PDF). Monthly Weather Review. Retrieved 2011-11-23.
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It looks as though the eye will pass between Mindanao and Luzon, the two islands that hold the bulk of the Philippine population. Since there is a mix of small islands and water between these two large islands, it may not end up being the catastrophe that the global warming alarmists are looking (hoping) for. Move along, move along.
Filipinos are no strangers to calamities. The storm track closely follows the area where a devastating earthquake recently occurred. Your prayers are indeed highly appreciated.
Will Al Gore call this the first category 6 or will he go for a category 7?
(Please don’t take this as a lack of empathy for those in the path of a naturally occurring storm. The comment is aimed at the CAGW PR hype.)
isn’t this storm stronger…because the eye has spun down and gotten tighter/smaller??
…dunno, asking?
I’m glad to see so many here concerned for the safety of Filipinos. Poverty is widespread and many people along the coasts live in tin shacks. A lot of people will die if emergency warnings and evacuations aren’t in place and being heeded. Even in the U.S. this would be a deadly storm; in the Philippines it will be a hundred times worse. There are many things we can do to help poor people prepare for these kinds of storms and clean up afterward. Tilting at the windmills of AGW and carbon dioxide emissions isn’t one of them. In fact it diverts resources away from productive solutions to real problems as Bjorn Lomborg points out.
Meanwhile the total number of intense storms (4&5) has been declining globally since 1987.
The numbers for any Typhoon before then in the WPAC cannot be compared to modern numbers since they stopped aircraft reconnaissance, and we no longer have that important constraint on the intensity estimates there. I doubt Haiyan is really more intense than Tip but even if it is a record is *not* the same thing as a trend.
An unusually active typhoon season?
While the Atlantic had a very quiet tropical season, the western Pacific has been on the active side. This year, 30 named storms have formed and 5 super typhoons, which is slightly above average, but nothing out of the ordinary. On average, the western Pacific gets 27 named storms.
The most active season in terms of number of named storms in the western Pacific was 1964 (39 storms), but the largest number of super typhoons was in 1965 (there were 11).
The season was quiet (like in the eastern Pacific and Atlantic) until about mid-September, and hasn’t taken a breather since then. On average, approximately 30 percent of all tropical cyclones in the western Pacific occur between mid-September and mid-November, but this year, about 45 percent of the season’s tropical cyclones occurred in that two-month window (since the season is still ongoing, that number could fluctuate a bit). So, it’s not that the season is unusually active, but it is getting active later than normal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/11/07/super-typhoon-haiyan-closes-in-on-philippines-among-strongest-storms-ever/?hpid=z5
Below is NOAA’s description of one of the hurricanes I experienced in Houston, Texas, September 11, 1961. Carla. This one appears to be even more powerful. We sheltered in place and were just fine, having made adequate preparations for living without running water, and no electricity for about ten days.
Note the statement that the wind equipment blew away in the storm, and a storm surge of 22 feet.
“Carla was an extremely large hurricane with devastating effects from the winds and storm surge for the Middle and Upper Texas coast. Hurricane force gusts were recorded along the Texas coast from Port Mansfield to Galveston. The highest sustained wind speeds reported were 115 mph at Matagorda, 110 mph at Victoria, and 88 mph at Galveston. Extreme peak wind gusts were estimated to be near 170 mph at Port Lavaca as the wind equipment blew away after reading 153 mph. Wind gusts were estimated to be around 150 mph at Victoria, Port Aransas, and Edna. Wind gusts of 80 to 90 mph were reported from Rockport to Corpus Christi.
Carla’s storm surge devastated the Texas coast, rising to 10 feet above normal along a 300 mile swath from Port Aransas to Sabine Pass. The higher tides reached the Upper Texas coast by the 8th as the large hurricane approached with storm surge eventually reaching 10 to 15 feet around Galveston Bay. Tides of 15 to 17 feet above mean sea level inundated Port O’Connor, Indianola, Palacios and Matagorda. The extreme tides inundated downtown Port Lavaca with 2 feet of flood water and displaced fishing boats and tug boats on Highway 35. With the slow movement of Carla, the hurricane pushed a storm surge of 22 feet above mean seal level at the head of Lavaca Bay in Port Lavaca. This is the highest storm surge in Texas hurricane history. Total inundation of the Texas coastline was around 1.7 million acres with the storm surge reaching 10 miles inland in places.”
Water temperatures in the tropical basins are warm enough every year to support super cyclones like Haiyan, but such storms rarely occur because the atmospheric conditions have to be perfect. A pocket of dry air or the slightest upper level wind shear usually prevents tropical cyclones from getting anywhere near as strong as Haiyan. Sometimes, however, everything happens just the way it needs to for a super cyclone to evolve.
My heart goes out to the people of the Central Philippines, who are at this very moment, going through one of natures most terrifying creations and are fighting for their lives. The storm will be gone tomorrow, but their ordeal is only just beginning.
Cebu should also get away [i]relatively[/i] unscathed, but the quarter of a million souls of Tacloban are in mortal danger. The city lies in San Pedro Bay and is on the right side, hence windier side, of the eye. Storm surge and wind speeds will be greatest here, with the topography exaggerating the effects.
For those who think they recognise the name, Tacloban was the site of MacArthur’s HQ during the Second World War.
OT
Peak oil and gas has arrived. 🙂
When will these people make up their minds?
I now pray for the Filipinos as I once prayed for myself. That was during Typhoon Hope in 1979. I was living in Hong Kong when she hit. The next day it looked like some giant had stalked the New Territories swinging a flail at about 15 feet above the ground, nothing above that height was there.
During the night I cowered in the smallest room in the house (the toilet) with my cats and dogs. I could hear massive thumps against the house and tried to go outside to see if it was a tree or some other debris hitting the house. It wasn’t. It was what the Cantonese call “dai fung” or big winds, referring to the very small but highly destructive high-speed squalls which form within the walls of a typhoon. When I peered outside I thought that I’d been hit in the face by some flying gravel. When I went inside to my refuge and checked I discovered that I had a green leaf embedded edgeways in my face.
A typhoon is terrifying; it is Nature at its most demonic. There is nothing you can do but cower and hope to survive.
“Deep warm water” – the stupid really does burn sometimes.
Wind speeds reported by aircraft and radar tend to overestimate storm intensity.
Hurricanes are defined by sustained surface wind speeds.
Sustained wind speeds at the surface still show Haiya to be a major hurricane that resembles Andrew for size and intensity.
I drove through the storm path of Andrew 6 weeks after landfall. Basically entire towns were scrubbed off the face of the earth.
Everything above the surface was gone, except for some commercial structures, reinforced concrete or metal. Anything wood, houses or trees, was gone. Much debris had been pushed into large piles on the sides of roads. Metal poles survived but not wood. Most metal structures were just skeletons.
Drove by a residential area and all you could see was the concrete curbs and a few metal pipes. A very few people had built heavily reinforced houses, they looked to be still livable, with some roof damage. A few reinforced concrete sturctures looked ok, but with no windows.
The philipines knows how to respond to hurricanes, but the lives of the people who can’t evactuate will be mostly gone.
I believe that recent solar X-flares are responsible for this particular extreme weather event. Conversely, the ongoing lack of solar activity until recently explains the dearth of tornadoes and hurricanes in North America this season. Does anyone remember that a large X-flare preceded Katrina?
Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction forecasted a month ahead the high solar activity for the end of last month, and he was right, and his resulting weather forecast for the USA was right on the money as well and for the eastern Atlantic storm. EVERYONE should want to know how Corbyn knows ahead of time so far and accurately what the solar activity is going to be and how that relates to Earth weather.
I believe we are on the edge of a transformation in understanding the true source of power in our climate: the electric weather effect – protons en masse from solar emissions and cosmic sources, modulated by lunar motion. Like Piers says: it solar particles and magnetic linkages, not CO2!
Oh no!
My Filipino wife’s mother lives right in the area.
I have been in Tacloban several times since 2003 and yes it is barely above sea level.The town could be wiped out.
A few days ago, this hurricane was only forecast to be in the Category 3 range. It was clearly heading straight into the Philippines but it has really strengthened. Been watching it at:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/satellite.php
Karl W. Braun says:
November 7, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Filipinos are no strangers to calamities. The storm track closely follows the area where a devastating earthquake recently occurred. Your prayers are indeed highly appreciated.
_____________________________
The Phillippine Islands are one of those places where man is surrounded by profound beauty, as if in compensation for what the people must endure, both from nature and himself. The ancient rice terraces are as pleasing to the eye as any natural landscape, yet the history of the place is rife with accounts of the worst acts of both man and nature. It’s in places like the Phillippines, where man lives closest to the edge of existence, that the duality of the world is so evident.
Willis Eschenbach says:
November 7, 2013 at 2:36 pm
In addition, preparation seems to serve both functions, under the old idea that “God helps those that help themselves” …
w.
===============
Of the old “mantras”, that is the only one I’ll repeat when asked to.
Anthony,
Thanks for covering this. The respect and thoughts commenters have for the impending human cost is nice to see. Kudos to WUWT. I echo those sentiments with a special mention for the people of the tiny island of Malapascua 100 miles ish north of Cebu City. I have been visiting there every year since I started diving and it is just an amazing place with wonderful, friendly locals. Unfortunately it is forecast to be in the direct path of Yolanda and stands little chance. If ever anyone is out Philippine way in the future consider including it in your trip, it’s fantastic! If you are a diver or love the underwater world and have the time here is taste of Malapascua as we filmed it this year and how it will no doubt recover to in the future.
Good Luck Philippines.
u.k.(us) says:
November 7, 2013 at 4:32 pm
Willis Eschenbach says:
November 7, 2013 at 2:36 pm
In addition, preparation seems to serve both functions, under the old idea that “God helps those that help themselves” …
w.
===============
Of the old “mantras”, that is the only one I’ll repeat when asked to.
_________________________
How about:
“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”- Steven Wright, comedian
Nevermind.
“Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction forecasted a month ahead the high solar activity for the end of last month, and he was right, and his resulting weather forecast for the USA was right on the money as well and for the eastern Atlantic storm.”
When did you receive the forecast and when was the event? What was the specific forecast and the specific event? Dates and exact wording would be appreciated. There are linkages from solar activity to weather but that doesn’t make weather predictable. There are two many other variables including chaotic effects, so I am skeptical that such forecasts can go beyond general tendencies (e.g. there will be more storms within a general area and period of time)
Lots of unknown unknowns about Super Typhoons, and as noted really hard to compare. Dumb ships either avoid them or sink.
I’ve been to Cebu City. A hardier bunch you will not find.
Wow, that storm really did tighten up just prior to landfall. Thoughts and prayers to those folks in its path. I hope they had some time to prepare.
Some of you may have to scroll this loop to the right.
http://wxweb.meteostar.com/models/noaaport_loop.php?PATH=/var/www/leads_images/satellite/NHE/IR/