Global Courant
Typhoon Doksuri, a tropical cyclone moving through the Pacific Ocean with winds similar to a Category 4 hurricane, could hit the northern Philippines on Tuesday before passing Taiwan and making landfall in China later this week.
Late Tuesday morning, the storm was about 267 miles east of Tuguegarao City, near the east coast of Luzon, the country’s largest and most populous island, the Philippine National Meteorological Service reports. said in a bulletin. The agency warned that flooding and rain-induced landslides were possible for the next three days, and urged people in some low-lying areas to evacuate.
Doksuri had a maximum sustained wind speed of nearly 150 mph on Tuesday morning, according to the U.S. military. Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii. That would make it a powerful Category 4 storm on the coast dish which is used to measure hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Category 5 storms, the most intense, have maximum sustained winds of 250 km/h or higher.
The storm was moving to the northwest at about 9 mph Tuesday morning and would either make landfall that night or Wednesday morning or pass very close to parts of Luzon or nearby islands, the Philippine Meteorological Department said. It was predicted to make landfall Friday morning on China’s southern coast, likely near Fujian province.
In the Philippines, where the government has used a parallel typhoon naming system for decades, Doksuri is known as Egay.
A tropical cyclone is a storm, usually a few hundred miles in diameter, that begins over a tropical ocean and produces violent winds, torrential rain, and high waves. The term “hurricane” applies to those that form in the North Atlantic, Northeast Pacific, Caribbean Sea, or Gulf of Mexico; “typhoon” applies to those that develop in the Northwest Pacific and affect Asia.
As Doksuri heads for China this week, several inches of rain are expected to fall in Taiwan and possibly reach the southern tip of the island, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.
Heavy rain and high winds are also weather forecast for later this week in Hong Kong, the Chinese territory that lies off the south coast of the mainland and west of both Taiwan and Fujian province.