Super Typhoon Haiyan is bearing down on the Central Philippines.
You don't need to be a meteorologist to understand that you don't want to be anywhere near this thing. Just look at that satellite photo. It looks just like Hurricane Katrina.
By the time it hits the Eastern Visayas, Haiyan will have maximum sustained winds of 149mph. How fast is that?
Well, 149mph is 24mph faster than Hurricane Katrina was when it made landfall. It would be an incredibly strong hurricane – four on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. There is no difference between a hurricane and a typhoon, except for the region in which they originate. Only a few hurricanes in United States history had stronger winds at landfall: Andrew, Camille and Charley come to mind immediately. All of these were devastating to the areas affected.
The winds reflect the strength of a storm that is rarely seen. It's central pressure is somewhere south of 900mb at the current time. There are only four other storms over the past 20 years in the western Pacific with a lower pressure. Though we don't have the tools to measure the exact pressure of storms in the western Pacific, Haiyan is at least within the top 20 of all time. Katrina had a pressure of 902mb, which is the all-time record for a US hurricane.
Yet it's not just the pressure or the wind. We will be looking at somewhere between eight and 12 inches of rain, across a wide area. That would be well within the top echelon for hurricanes in the United States. Flood warnings are regularly issued for rain amounts an eighth to a twelfth as much. With additional rain from other storm systems, multiple mudslides are a good possibility.
Haiyan is going to be historic in many ways. The winds, which will likely drop by landfall, are now 195mph. This may be the strongest such winds since we started using satellites to measure storm strength. Nate Cohn of the New Republic said he has never seen anything like Haiyan.
Of course, it's easy to get lost in the meteorology of the storm.
What this storm is about, at the end of the day, is how many people will be affected. Indeed, it is the wide area of the storm that makes one most worried. The storm is 500 miles wide. That's wider than Katrina was at its peak. It's affecting more than 25 million people. That's more people than live in the New York City metropolitan area, which was affected by Hurricane Sandy last year.
This storm is incredibly dangerous. We can only hope the storm turns out to be less severe than forecasted. Otherwise, I fear the news from the Central Philippines in the days ahead.