Typhoon Kills at Least 25 People in China, Reports Say

 

A powerful typhoon that struck Hong Kong on Sunday killed at least 30 people and forced the evacuation of thousands of people on the China mainland, and hundreds of flights were canceled.

Typhoon Usagi — Japanese for rabbit — is the third and strongest Pacific typhoon to form this year. It was classified as a severe, or "super," typhoon after meteorologists recorded gusts of up to 160 miles per hour (260 kilometers per hour).

If you've never lived in Asia, you might be wondering what it feels like to experience a typhoon. But if you've ever survived a hurricane or cyclone, you already know the answer.

That's because hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same weather phenomenon. Scientists just call these storms different things depending on where they occur.

In the Atlantic and northern Pacific, the storms are called "hurricanes," after the Caribbean god of evil, named Hurrican.

In the northwestern Pacific, the same powerful storms are called "typhoons." In the southeastern Indian Ocean and southwestern Pacific, they are called "severe tropical cyclones."

In the northern Indian Ocean, they're called "severe cyclonic storms." In the southwestern Indian Ocean, they're just "tropical cyclones."
To be classified as a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone, a storm must reach wind speeds of at least 74 miles per hour (119 kilometers per hour).
If a hurricane's winds reach speeds of 111 miles per hour (179 kilometers per hour), it is upgraded to an "intense hurricane."

If a typhoon hits 150 miles per hour (241 kilometers per hour) — as Usagi did — then it becomes a "supertyphoon."

Effects of Global Warming?

In recent years, scientists have debated whether human-caused global warming is affecting hurricanes by making them stronger or causing them to occur more frequently. (Related: "Rising Temperatures May Cause More Katrinas.")

In theory, warmer atmospheric temperatures should lead to warmer sea surface temperatures, which should in turn support stronger hurricanes.
The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide nearly doubled from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. Moreover, both the duration of tropical cyclones and their strongest wind speeds have increased by about 50 percent over the past 50 years.
But there is no scientific consensus on a link is between climate change and hurricanes.

"Average tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase, although increases may not occur in all ocean basins," according to the 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. (Related: "Leaked Report Spotlights Big Climate Change Assessment.")

"It is likely that the global frequency of tropical cyclones will either decrease or remain essentially unchanged."

A man ran away from a storm surge generated by Typhoon Usagi that hit a wharf on Sunday in Shantou, south China's Guangdong province.
  BEIJING — A powerful typhoon that had threatened Hong Kong brushed past the southern Chinese city on Sunday night and crashed into Guangdong Province. The local news media said at least 25 people were killed.

Typhoon Usagi, described as among the region’s most dangerous storms in three decades, forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights in Hong Kong and delayed the opening of financial markets on Monday. But it weakened as it approached the densely populated Pearl River Delta with winds that topped out at around 110 miles per hour.

More than half of the deaths occurred in and around the coastal city of Shanwei on Sunday night. The dead included seven railroad construction workers, two people who drowned when their fishing boat capsized, and a man hit by a window dislodged by gale-force winds, the state-run media said. Flooding and strong gusts brought down power lines, leaving 170,000 people without electricity.

Across Guangdong, the official Xinhua news agency said, the storm destroyed 7,100 homes and forced the evacuation of around 226,000 people. Damage was estimated at more than $500 million. In Shantou, another coastal city, rising floodwaters helped a two-ton hippopotamus escape from its enclosure at the city zoo. Photographs posted on the Internet showed the animal bobbing in a nearby canal, but it was reportedly coaxed back by zoo workers by Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the week, Usagi — which means rabbit in Japanese — plowed through the Luzon Strait, which separates Taiwan and the Philippines, killing at least four people. For a while on Friday, the storm qualified as a supertyphoon, a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but it began to lose some of its punch on Sunday.

According to the Hong Kong Observatory, the storm injured 13 people across the city and forced the cancellation of 370 flights, leaving hundreds of travelers stranded at the city’s airport.

On the Chinese mainland, high-speed train service between Guangzhou and Beijing was suspended and 540 flights were canceled just as millions of travelers were returning after a three-day national holiday. By Monday evening, the storm, still packing heavy wind and rain, was sweeping northwest to China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.