The variability of the typhoon landfall pattern
in China is investigated using historical and modern
records. The work is motivated by a recent hypothesis
of an inverse relationship between the frequency
of typhoons over northern China to those over Guangdong
Province in the south (Liu et al., 2001; Elsner
and Liu, 2003). The study makes use of the modern
instrumental record of typhoons over the coastal
provinces of China and documentary evidence of typhoons
over Guangdong and Fujian. Indices for ENSO
and the PDO are combined with regionally-averaged
SLPs and SSTs to examine climate factors related to the pattern of China landfalls. The originality of this
work rests with the examination of both historical and
modern landfall records and in the use of a factor
model for identifying the dominant pattern of spatial
landfall variability.