Wildfish Media — Typhoon and Travel Weather in Asia

Thailand spent the last week under heavy rain warnings. A super typhoon is sitting in the Pacific. The two stories ran side by side in the same news cycles, and a lot of people connected them. They are not connected. The Thai Meteorological Department has been explicit: Dolphin is not expected to affect Thailand directly. A tropical system over Southeast Asian waters. Library image for illustration. It is not live satellite imagery of the storm discussed here — for current imagery use the agency links below. What is actually causing it Two things, both ordinary for the season. A monsoon trough is lying across the upper North and Northeast. And a rather strong southwesterly monsoon is running over the Andaman Sea, Thailand and the Gulf of Thailand. That combination produces exactly what is being observed — heavy to very heavy rain across the North, Northeast, Central region, the East, and down the South's west coast. TMD has warned about flash floods, run-off, landslide...

UPDATE — 11 August 2026. There is a live storm on Japan right now, and it is not Dolphin. Chan-hom — Typhoon No. 15 in the Japanese numbering, 14W to the JTWC — is approaching the Pacific coast today. Current guidance has it coming ashore in the northern Kanto region, around Ibaraki and Fukushima, late on Tuesday 11 August into the early hours of Wednesday , passing roughly 160 km from Tokyo rather than over it. Peak intensity is forecast near 25 m/s sustained with gusts to about 35 m/s, and central pressure near 980 hPa, before it crosses Honshu, enters the Sea of Japan on the 12th and falls apart by the 13th. That is a much smaller storm than Dolphin, and for most travellers it will read as a wet, windy day rather than an emergency. It is still enough to move train schedules and flights, and this is a forecast, not a record — check the official pages below rather than this one. Airline typhoon waivers: how they actually work When each country in the region actually...

UPDATE — 11 August 2026. The verdict on this article, now that the storm has happened. The date in the headline was right: Dolphin hit mainland China on 9 August , as written here on 31 July, nine days out. The province was wrong. Landfall was on the Zhejiang coast near Yuhuan and then Wenzhou, roughly 300 km south of Jiangsu, at about 17:30 local time with winds near 42 m/s. The 6 August update above had already moved the call to Zhejiang, and that is where it went. Leaving both the original claim and the correction in place is deliberate. A track forecast nine days out is worth reading for its shape, not its landfall pin, and this is what that distinction looks like in practice: the timing survived, the location moved one province. How a forecast cone actually narrows The full result: what Dolphin did to Zhejiang and Shanghai China National Meteorological Center typhoon page UPDATE — 6 August 2026. This article was written on 1 August. The second landfall in this piece was stated ...

Super Typhoon Dolphin reached Category 5 this week. It was the fifth tropical cyclone on Earth to do so in 2026, and July is not over. Five is a lot for this point in the year. It is not a record, and it does not mean the planet has entered some new regime. But it is worth pausing on, because the reason it happened is not the one most people assume. A Saharan dust plume blowing west off Africa over the tropical Atlantic. Library image for illustration. It is not live satellite imagery of the storm discussed here — for current imagery use the agency links below. The count so far Genevieve got there first, in the eastern Pacific. It peaked at 160 mph sustained winds west of Mexico — the season's first Category 5 anywhere — and then spent its entire life over open water. Nobody on land noticed. Dolphin is the fifth, and the only one currently aimed at people. It formed in the western Pacific, ran up the scale fast, and is now expected to turn toward the Chinese coast i...

Search for this storm today and you will find maps with a confident red line running straight into somebody's coastline. Ignore them. Five days out from a recurving western Pacific typhoon, the honest position is that the destination is unsettled. Japan is on the table. So is Korea. So is a stretch of Chinese coastline a thousand kilometres to the southwest. Understanding why that gap exists is worth more to a traveller than any single arrow. Satellite frames a few hours apart, showing a cyclone's inner core reorganising. Library image for illustration. It is not live satellite imagery of the storm discussed here — for current imagery use the agency links below. The part everyone agrees on Through roughly the second of August, the guidance is tight. Dolphin drifts west-northwest around 20 km/h, stays at the top of the intensity scale, and never comes near a coastline. After that the steering pattern shifts. The storm is expected to swing more due west and accelerate to...

UPDATE — 11 August 2026. Dolphin is over. It made landfall on the Zhejiang coast near Yuhuan, in Taizhou, at about 17:30 local time on Sunday 9 August , with sustained winds near the centre of about 42 m/s (roughly 151 km/h) , and came ashore a second time near Wenzhou about an hour later. It was the strongest tropical cyclone to hit China this year. More than a million people were moved out of its path, Wenzhou alone relocating over 900,000. Shanghai's two airports cancelled on the order of 1,300 flights and cut capacity by close to 40 per cent, and central Shanghai streets flooded on the Monday after the storm had already weakened. Parts of Zhejiang were forecast 200 to 400 mm of rain in the days that followed. Note what that last line means, because it is the point this site keeps returning to: the wind headline ended on Sunday evening and the water problem started afterwards. What this tracker got right and wrong, in detail Why the water, not the wind, is the part that lingers...