Typhoon Doksuri, a tropical cyclone moving through the Pacific Ocean with wind speeds equivalent to that of a Category 4 hurricane, was forecast to potentially hit the northern Philippines on Tuesday before passing near Taiwan and making landfall in China later this week.
As of early Tuesday evening local time, the storm was about 118 east of Luzon, the country’s largest and most populous island, the Philippine national meteorological service said in a bulletin. The agency had warned that flooding and rain-induced landslides were possible over the next three days, and urged people in some low-lying areas to evacuate.
Doksuri had a maximum sustained wind speed of about 144 miles per hour on Tuesday afternoon, according to the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii. That would make it a Category 4 storm on the scale that is used to measure hurricanes in the Atlantic. Category 5 storms, the most intense, have maximum sustained winds of 157 m.p.h. or higher.
The storm was moving northwest at about 12 m.p.h. as of 5 p.m. on Tuesday and was expected to either make landfall or pass very close to parts of Luzon or nearby islands that night or on Wednesday morning, the Philippine meteorological service said. It was forecast to make landfall on China’s southern coast, likely in the vicinity of Fujian Province, on Friday morning.
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, typically one with a diameter of a couple hundred miles, that begins over a tropical ocean and generates violent winds, torrential rain and high waves. The term “hurricane” applies to those that form in the North Atlantic, the northeastern Pacific, the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico; “typhoon” applies to ones that develop in the northwestern Pacific and affect Asia.
As Doksuri heads toward China this week, it is expected to drop several inches of rain in Taiwan and potentially hit the island’s southern tip, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.
Heavy rain and high winds are also forecast for later this week in Hong Kong, the Chinese territory that sits off the mainland’s southern coast and west of both Taiwan and Fujian Province.
