This year’s first Super Typhoon Yagi formed on Thursday over the muggy waters of the western Pacific Ocean and was on track to eventually make landfall in southern China.
The powerful storm, which formed as a tropical depression in the Philippine Sea on Sunday, peaked with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph local time on Thursday afternoon, the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane. At least 13 people were killed in the Philippines due to flooding and landslides.
Forecasters expect the storm to weaken somewhat by the weekend before battering China’s Hainan island, bringing dangerously strong winds and flooding rain to the popular tourist destination. Typhoon Yagi is expected to be the strongest storm to hit the region in a decade, closing schools, closing bridges and cancelling flights in the southern Chinese provinces of Hainan and Guangdong.
But the ferocity of Super Typhoon Yagi isn’t as unusual as you might imagine: the Western Pacific Ocean has the unique ability to produce some of the most powerful storms on Earth.
Satellite image of Yagi on September 4, 2024.Courtesy of NOAA
A typhoon is a strong tropical cyclone, and is a general term for low-pressure systems that develop through a special process, unlike the “ordinary” cyclones that we encounter on a daily basis.
Powerful thunderstorms that develop around low-pressure centers act like the engines that power these systems. Warm ocean waters provide the thunderstorms that swirl through the tropics with the energy they need to survive and thrive. These storms can last for days or even weeks, as long as they maintain access to steamy ocean waters and favorable conditions in the surrounding atmosphere.
Tropical cyclones are all the same around the world; the only difference is what they’re called: a mature tropical cyclone in the Atlantic is called a hurricane, while the same storm in the western Pacific is called a typhoon.
