Wildfish Media — Typhoon and Travel Weather in Asia

Almost every guide to Laos says the same thing about the rainy season, which is that it runs roughly May to October and that you should go in the dry season instead. That is not wrong, but it is not much use either, because it collapses six quite different months into one warning and it never says what the rain actually stops you doing. The useful version of this question is narrower. How much rain, on how many days, and does it close the specific thing you were going for. Those three have real answers, and the answers are less discouraging than the general advice implies. The rainfall by month, in actual numbers Taking Luang Prabang as the reference point, the shape of the year is steep rather than gradual. Using the monthly averages published by Weather Spark, rainfall by month runs roughly like this: January 5 mm, February 5 mm, March 18 mm, April 46 mm, May 86 mm, June 99 mm, July 142 mm, August 163 mm, September 109 mm, October 38 mm, November 18 mm, December 5 mm. Published ...

The question people ask after a typhoon passes is rarely about the wind. It is about when the lights come back on, and almost nobody gets a straight answer, because the honest answer depends on which part of the system broke. Coverage tends to report a single restoration figure for a whole region, which is why the numbers can look encouraging while a particular street stays dark for three more weeks. Those two things are not in conflict. They are measuring different objects, and once you know which is which, you can make a fairly good estimate for where you are standing. Transmission is not the same thing as your street The Philippine grid is split between two kinds of operator, and they are repaired by different people on different schedules. The National Grid Corporation of the Philippines runs transmission, which is the high voltage network, generally 69 kV and above, carrying power between plants and substations. Everything below that belongs to a distribution utility or, acros...

As of the Japan Meteorological Agency bulletins issued on the morning of 23 August, there are four tropical cyclones running at the same time in the western Pacific. One typhoon, two tropical storms, and a depression that is expected to be named within the day. This looks alarming written down, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not mean. Four systems at once is not a record and not an anomaly for late August. What matters is that only one of the four is a serious storm, and the other three are in completely different places affecting completely different people. Saudel is the one that matters this week Typhoon Saudel, numbered 18 by JMA, was at 20.8N 143.1E at 06:00 JST on 23 August with a central pressure of 950 hPa and maximum sustained winds of 80 kt. That is a strong typhoon and the only one of the four with a properly formed core. The forecast has it deepening tonight to 935 hPa and 90 kt, which moves it into the very strong grade, then reaching 925 hPa ...

Rapid intensification is the phrase that turns up whenever a storm gets worse faster than the coverage expected. It is used loosely almost everywhere, and it has a specific official meaning that most of those uses do not meet. The gap between the two is worth understanding, because it is the single thing forecasters are worst at predicting. This week gives a clean example to work from. Typhoon Saudel is strengthening steadily on its way toward the Ryukyu Islands, and by the official definition it is not undergoing rapid intensification at all. Walking through why is more useful than any general explanation. The official definition is a number, not a feeling The threshold used by the National Hurricane Center is an increase of at least 30 kt in maximum sustained winds within 24 hours. That is roughly 35 mph, or 55 km/h, added to a storm in a single day. There is no judgement in it. Either the wind gained 30 kt in 24 hours or it did not. Applied to Saudel, the official Japanese fore...

Typhoon Saudel, which the Japan Meteorological Agency numbers as the eighteenth typhoon of 2026, is now forecast to pass Okinawa in the middle of this week. It is the first storm this season that has the whole Ryukyu chain inside the forecast track rather than off to one side of it. This is not a storm that arrives suddenly. It has been crossing open water for the better part of a week, and the useful thing about that is the forecast has had time to settle. Below is what the official numbers say, what usually breaks first on Okinawa, and the one number worth watching if you are on the island. What the forecast track actually says As of the 03:00 JST analysis on 22 August, Saudel was near 17.1N 147.7E with a central pressure of 970 hPa and maximum sustained winds of 65 kt. JMA grades it as a strong typhoon. It is moving west-northwest across open ocean with nothing in the way. The official forecast has it deepening steadily rather than explosively. By 03:00 on 23 August it is put a...

Every time a storm gets close to Hawaii, the same question turns up in search: why does this almost never happen? It is a fair question. Hawaii sits in the middle of the largest ocean on earth, in the tropics, and yet the last hurricane to directly hit the Big Island before Hurricane Lala was an unnamed storm in 1871. The short answer is that three separate things usually have to go wrong for a hurricane at the same time, and near Hawaii at least one of them almost always does. This is the long answer, with the 2026 storm as a live worked example, because Lala did all three of these things in front of the forecasters within about four days. How often Hawaii actually gets hit About four or five tropical cyclones appear in the central Pacific in a typical year, and in an active year that number can climb much higher; the 2015 season produced as many as fifteen. Very few of them ever touch the state. Reliable tropical cyclone records for this part of the Pacific do not go back before ...

Hurricane Lala never made an official landfall on any of the main Hawaiian Islands. That single line has confused a lot of people this week, because the damage reports coming out of Hawaii Island read exactly like a landfall. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is worth understanding before you read another headline about this storm. Lala formed on August 12 from a tropical wave in the central eastern Pacific and was named a tropical storm at 15:00 UTC on August 13. It became a hurricane at 19:00 UTC on August 15, nine in the morning local time, right as it was closing on the Big Island. Early on August 16 it made its closest approach, the eyewall scraped the southern part of the island, and land interaction then tore it down to a tropical storm by midday. Then it did something most people did not expect. It moved away, reorganized over open water, and came back as a Category 4 on August 19 with winds of 130 mph and a pressure of 947 mb. As of the 11 AM HST adviso...

Korea is the country in this part of the world that people do not associate with typhoons, and for most of the year that instinct is correct. Then a fortnight arrives in late summer when it is very much not, and the surprise does more damage than the storm. The useful facts here are the boring ones. When the window actually is, how many storms actually arrive, which part of the country gets them, and what the two Korean alerts mean when you see them on a phone in Korean. Photographs here are stock images for illustration and are not pictures of the events described. The Peak Months are August and September The Korean season runs from June to October, and the storms that matter arrive in August and September. That is the shortest honest version of it. The reason is steering rather than heat. Storms form far to the south and spend most of their lives moving west. Whether one reaches Korea depends on when it turns north, and that turn is governed by the position of the subtropical h...