Typhoon Yagi underwent spectacular intensification in the northwest Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, taking it from Category 1 to Category 4 in less than 12 hours. Yagi’s one-minute sustained winds reached 150 mph (240 km/h) at 8 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. This classified it as a super typhoon (one-minute sustained winds of at least 150 mph (240 km/h)) and made it the strongest tropical cyclone in the northwest Pacific so far this season. In an environment of low wind shear and abundant moisture, Yagi drew its power from sea surface temperatures of about 86-88°F (30-31 degrees Celsius), about 1.8-3.6°F (1-2 degrees Celsius) warmer than average for early September.
An eyewall replacement cycle early Thursday weakened Yagi, and by 8 a.m. EDT Thursday, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center declared Yagi a Category 4 storm with 1-minute average sustained winds of 140 mph and a central pressure of 933 mb, moving west at 10 mph. Further weakening is expected as Yagi makes contact with land and oceanic heat becomes harder to come by. Yagi is forecast to make landfall Friday morning (US EDT) as a Category 3 storm in southern China’s Guangdong province, a tropical area that includes the southernmost points of mainland China. Yagi is expected to weaken to Category 1 by Saturday morning before moving into northern Vietnam.
According to Xinhua, ferries and passenger trains between the Leizhou Peninsula and Hainan Island have been suspended. Yagi could move over or near Haikou, the island’s largest city (population 3 million), which is located on Hainan’s northern coast. If Yagi moves a little further north, the coastal city of Zhanjiang (population 7 million) on the mainland could also be severely affected.
Should Yagi reach China at Category 4, it would join a select club. China’s long, populous east coast has seen only 13 Category 4 typhoons make at least landfall in recent records (Fig. 1). Only two of those were Category 5, most recently Rammasun in 2014. Yagi follows a very similar path to Rammasun, the fifth-worst typhoon to hit China on record (over $4 billion in damage, see list of top 5 below). Strong typhoons tend to either turn around before reaching China or weaken en route to the coast, especially when interacting with the mountainous terrain of the Philippines and Taiwan.
The five most devastating typhoons in Chinese history
According to EM-DAT, the following typhoons in China are the most expensive on record (inflation-adjusted in 2023 dollars):
- 1) $25 billion, Doksuri, 2023
- 2) 12 billion dollars, Lekima, 2019
- 3) 9 billion dollars, Fitow, 2013
- 4) 6 billion dollars, Romania, 2018
- 5) 4 billion dollars, Rammasun, 2014
Missing from this list is perhaps China’s most devastating typhoon of all time, Typhoon Nina of 1975. Nina lingered for two days and brought massive rainfall to the Ru River basin above the Banqiao Dam, causing the dam to collapse and the loss of 171,000 lives. An area 55 kilometers long and 13 kilometers wide was devastated. China did not acknowledge the disaster until the mid-1990s.
The Atlantic continues to be characterized by only weak disturbances
Notably, the North Atlantic remains quiet in terms of tropical cyclones during the first week of September. The National Hurricane Center was tracking five systems early Thursday, but none had a higher than 30 percent chance of forming. This unusual situation gave the Tropical Weather Outlook released at 8 a.m. EDT Thursday a unique (and likely unprecedented) look, with five lemon-yellow danger areas and no orange or cherry-red ones (see tweet below). With forecast models still ambiguous on potential development over the next week, it’s not out of the question that the Atlantic could go four full weeks—or even a full month—without a single new named system since Ernesto was christened on Aug. 12.
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