Typhoons Batter East Asia as ‘Strongest in Living Memory’ El Niño Heats the Pacific

A wave of intense and at times unpredictable storms has battered East Asia's coasts over the past few months, amplified by the El Niño weather pattern. The storms have killed dozens of people, shut major airports and wiped out crops and infrastructure across a broad swathe of the region.

In October, nearly all of Taiwan shut down as Typhoon Champi, a monster storm big enough to engulf the island of 23 million people, roared towards its north-eastern coast. Equivalent to a category five hurricane, its winds reached 295km/h (193mph), powerful enough to flatten homes and whip up destructive waves.

Champi ultimately skirted past Taiwan without making landfall, dousing the island in rain, but its reach was wide: hundreds of flights were cancelled in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, seaside highways in the Philippines' Batanes archipelago closed as huge waves crashed ashore, and power was cut to 15,000 homes in southern Japan's Okinawa islands.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon in which warm waters pool in the eastern Pacific and altered wind patterns drive extreme weather around the world. It occurs roughly every two to seven years and lasts for about a year. This year's event, which the UK Met Office has forecast to be the ‘strongest in living memory’, is likely to continue until February or March.

In June, Japan watched two storms — Typhoon Mekkhala and Severe Tropical Storm Higos — race towards its eastern coast at the same time, forcing one million people to evacuate. In July, Tropical Storm Narra grazed China's southern coast along Guangxi, submerging villages and displacing tens of thousands of people.

August brought Super Typhoon Dolphin, which churned across the Pacific for 16 days before slamming into eastern China, triggering heavy floods and dozens of casualties. Later that month, Typhoon Saudel made landfall in three south-eastern Chinese cities within one week, shutting transport networks and forcing thousands to evacuate.

The Pacific Ocean, heated to record levels by El Niño, is now brimming with typhoon energy, according to the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) metric, which measures the total intensity of a season's storms. This year, the ACE reading for South East and East Asia is forecast to be nearly double the 30-year average.

El Niño is also shifting wind patterns, so typhoons are tending to form further east than usual and grow stronger by spending longer over warm water. Ana Liza Solis, head of climatology at the Philippines' national weather bureau, likened the Pacific to someone ‘burning with fever’ at a press briefing in Manila in September, warning that ‘it can go into convulsions soon’.

Forecasts suggest the worst may not be over. Last month, sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific — the area monitored by the Japan Meteorological Agency for its El Niño predictions — soared to 4C above normal, the highest since records began in 1949. The previous record, 3.6C, was set in December 1997. China's climate agency has warned that sea surface temperatures will keep rising over the next three months because of El Niño.

In August, Typhoon Chan-Hom baffled storm watchers in Japan by crossing the country from east to west, rather than along the usual south-to-north path. Japan's well-resourced and prepared authorities were able to evacuate people swiftly, but the same would be far more challenging in some neighbouring countries.

To gauge how warming amplifies the risks, Manila-based climatologist Rafaela Jane Delfino and colleagues simulated the effects of warmer conditions on the Philippines' most recent monster storms, including 2013's Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), which killed more than 6,000 people. Their findings, in Delfino's words ‘very, very scary’, showed higher temperatures increased total accumulated rainfall by 26 per cent.

Countries are bracing for the immediate impact. Japan has urged citizens to stockpile food and essentials for the typhoon season and to secure outdoor furniture that could become deadly projectiles in typhoon winds. China has asked local officials to identify vulnerable areas and is upgrading its warning and monitoring systems. The Philippines and its South East Asian neighbours are preparing for disruptions to food production, especially rice, and have increased support for farmers, including the provision of fertilisers.

The United Nations Development Programme in Asia and the Pacific said recently that the window for governments to act on El Niño is ‘closing’. ‘How severely a community experiences an El Niño is decided years in advance, by where roads and settlements are built, how water is managed, who is covered by social protection and whether public budgets have room to absorb a shock,’ it said, adding that every El Niño tests the resilience built beforehand — and this one should also drive countries to build more.