There is an incredible natural tragedy unfolding in East Asia this week. Typhoon Morakot and Tropical Storm Etau have been battering the coast and islands, in particular, Taiwan.
This really is bigger than Katrina, and we should all be paying attention.
Everybody said this year would be calm from the point of view of big Summer storms.
They said that the emerging El Nino phase of the Southern Ocean oscillation would dampen down the activity in “Hurricane Alley” between Africa and the Caribbean, so we should all relax.
Ocean cyclonic and anti-cyclonic storm activity is the way the Earth “cools down”, metaphorically speaking, during the Northern Summer.
All the heat that builds up in the near-Equatorial waters needs to disperse somehow.
As temperatures in general rise, it seems we are having more storm activity everywhere, all year round.
What nobody has been discussing is this : if the Caribbean basin and North America are not going to get serious storm activity this Summer, will other parts of the world be affected instead ?
Wikipedia is attempting to document what is happening in terms of natural disasters :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2009_natural_disasters
on their Disaster Portal :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Disasters
Here’s what Tropical Storm Etau looks like :-
Monitoring satellites continue to go up to help us understand the Climate and the weather. GOES-14 went up recently. Here is its first image, and it’s beautiful :-
