Super Typhoon Haiyan, Strongest Storm Hits Philippines 2013

Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever observed, made landfall Friday morning in the Philippines, the country's weather service reported. Thousands of people in vulnerable areas of the central Philippines were evacuated as the monster storm spun toward the country. With sustained winds of 315 kph (195 mph) and gusts as strong as 380 kph (235 mph), Haiyan churned across the Western Pacific into the Philippines. Its wind strength makes it equivalent to an exceptionally strong Category 5 hurricane. Haiyan will move over the many islands of the central Philippines over the next 18 hours before exiting into the South China Sea overnight Friday into Saturday. Haiyan will weaken slightly as the storm crosses land, but forecasters with the Philippine weather agency, Pagasa, predict that it will maintain super typhoon intensity throughout its passage of the islands.The U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecasts that Haiyan will cross the Central Philippines as a Category 4 or 5 Super Typhoon, and then re-emerge over open water, before making landfall in Vietnam as a Category 3 typhoon on November 10. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, said that Haiyan appears to be the strongest storm since Super Typhoon Tip in 1979. Maue said the storm has avoided the typical hiccups that other intense storms encounter, such as eyewall replacement cycles, during which a storm's inner core undergoes a reorganization. Such cycles can cause a Category 5 storm to weaken to a Category 3 or 4 storm, before re-strengthening. Instead of doing this, though, Haiyan has remained at peak strength for more than 24 hours, which is unusual, and even strengthened on Monday morning. After hitting the Leyte province, the Philippines’ Department of Science and Technology expects the storm to traverse the central Philippines from Biliran to Busuanga before passing into the West Philippine Sea. The Department is warning coastal residents to expect storm surges “which may reach up to 7-meter (23 feet) wave height,” along with flooding and mudslides.It’s nearly inconceivable that any weather station would survive such conditions for very long to verify, so we may never know exactly how strong this storm currently is. There have only been a handful of storms anywhere on Earth (pdf) that have reached this estimated intensity—and only three since 1969. Such strong storms usually remain out at sea where wind speed verification is impossible without aircraft. + The storm’s wind speed at landfall tops the last world record holder, the Atlantic’s Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi in 1969 with 190 mph winds. + That’s certainly foreboding enough, but the humanitarian disaster that may unfold could be immense. The latest forecast track by the JTWC shows Haiyan passing very near Tacloban, a city of a quarter million people, and Cebu, a city of nearly one million people.