(Image: NASA)
They may have cutesy Tolkienesque names, but 鈥� from left to right in the image 鈥� Phailin, Nari and Wipha have left behind them a trail of death and destruction this week. Cyclone Phailin, which at the weekend, triggered the country鈥檚 largest ever evacuation, of an estimated 800,000 people. These efforts restricted the death toll to just 22, all but one of those in a single state, Odisha.
With winds of 200 kilometres an hour, Phailin made landfall on Saturday, wrecking power-lines, roads and railways, and leaving an estimated 500,000 people homeless. But the toll is tiny compared with that from the region鈥檚 previous largest cyclone in 1999, which claimed an estimated 10,000 lives and caused $4.5 billion of damage.
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鈥淚t鈥檚 a success story in terms of lives saved,鈥� says Tom Mitchell, head of climate change at the UK Overseas Development Institute think tank.
Phailin wasn鈥檛 the only monster weather source in operation. With wind speeds up to 190 kilometres an hour, typhoon Nari ripped through the Philippines on Monday, killing at least 13 people and leaving 2.1 million without electricity.
Cooking up a storm
Although the least ferocious of the three, typhoon Wipha is strengthening quickly and could head north to Japan, potentially passing Tokyo on 15 or 16 October.
Despite their spectacular appearance from space, groups of tropical storms are not especially rare, says Julian Heming, tropical predictions specialist at the UK Met Office. 鈥淎t this time of the year, between August and October, it鈥檚 not unusual to see maybe two or three together in the west Pacific,鈥� he says.
The most likely explanation is a 30 to 60-day cycle called the . 鈥淚t鈥檚 a period of strong convective activity in the tropics moving west to east,鈥� says Heming. 鈥淲hen it reaches ocean basins, it can spark heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones can spin off from that.鈥� He points out that there have been nine storms in the region in the past 30 days, and that a further one is brewing in the west Pacific that could become a typhoon by next weekend.
Despite the chaos in Asia, storm activity has been unusually tame in the northern hemisphere this year 鈥� and there鈥檚 no good explanation as to why. 鈥淲e鈥檝e only had 58 per cent of the average expected storm activity this year, and in the Atlantic it鈥檚 incredibly suppressed, at 30 per cent of the average,鈥� says Heming.
