Thursday 17 April 2008

Hurricane update - 17 April

Typhoon Neoguri is currently heading north towards mainland China, between Hainan Island and Hong Kong. The storm will make landfall 130 miles west of Hong Kong, with winds of up to 70 mph. HK itself is not likely to be directly affected, but typhoons (hurricanes) are notoriously unpredictable.

This certainly applies to a tropical disturbance in the South Pacific, which looked suspicious to my untrained eye this afternoon. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Honolulu marked it up as 94P,
located between the Solomon Islands and New Caledonia, east of Australia, north of New Zealand. I was surprised when they did not think it could develop much. They changed their mind at 7 o'clock this evening, when they pushed out an alert that there is a likelihood of more than 50% that a cyclone could develop. Atmospheric conditions could give rise to a very nasty piece of work overnight, in the shape of a rapidly mushrooming tropical cyclone. Météo France at New Caledonia is still blissfully talking about a few showers with southeasterly trade winds - I think they could wake up to rather more than that by this time on Saturday.

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