Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog
Posted by
hanna on 11/6/2013, 11:07 am
Evacuations are underway in the Philippines Islands as extremely dangerous Category 5 Super Typhoon Haiyan heads west-northwest at 20 mph towards the islands. Haiyan, which is the Chinese word for a petrel seabird, is referred to as "Yolanda" in the Philippines, and became a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds at 12 UTC (7 am EDT) Wednesday. Haiyan became a Cat 5 at an unusually low latitude (7.9°N), but this is not a record. The most southerly Cat 5 on record was Super Typhoon Louise of 1964 (7.3°N), followed by 2012's Super Typhoon Bopha (7.4°N.) Haiyan is the fourth Category 5 storm in the Western Pacific and fifth on Earth so far in 2013. This is the highest number of Cat 5s since 2009, which had four Cat 5s in the Western Pacific and one in the Eastern Pacific. Since 2000, Earth has averaged 4.4 of these mightiest of tropical cyclones per year. The record for Cat 5s in a year is twelve, set in 1997, when an astonishing ten Cat 5s occurred in the Western Pacific. The Atlantic has not had a Category 5 storm since Hurricane Felix of 2007, making the past six years the longest stretch without a Cat 5 since 1981 - 1987.
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