Gaemi is making landfall this morning in Fujian province as a minimal typhoon or tropical storm. The satellite analysis from CIMSS this morning (night in China) shows a rapidly weakening storm …
Using the JTWC forecast and past track, the impact swath looks like this:
The primary threat on the mainland is from rain and flooding. It has been a wet year in parts of China, and this won’t help.
Damage reports for Taiwan are starting to come in. There are reports of two ships being sunk by the storm (a tanker and a cargo ship), flooding, and some damage across the island, but initial reports are far lighter than the JTWC track/forecast would indicate. There has been an epic amount of rain – 2.2 meters (over 7 feet!) in places in Taiwan, and so far the government reports three deaths and nearly 400 injured.
So what about damage? The economic impact estimates are heavily bifurcated depending on the agency used and wind model parameters. Normally the impact histogram is a bell curve – here is the histogram of 37 simulations using the China Meteorological Agency, the Japan Meteorological Agency, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (US DoD), and the objective GFS model. This obviously isn’t a bell curve 😛 …
There is a big cluster of estimates around $25 Billion, and then a bunch scattered above $65 Billion – these are the ones that have the eye wall of a strong typhoon over Taipei. That clearly didn’t happen, so it’s pretty obvious the lower cluster is more on target.
The post-storm analysis should provide a better idea of the structure of the storm. Gaemi will still be a bad event, with extensive economic impacts, but nowhere near the catastrophe it looked like yesterday morning. The very sharp turn to the south, and collapse of the core of the storm at the Taiwan shoreline, rendered those estimates inaccurate (garbage, to be honest). This kind of thing isn’t unheard of, but almost impossible to forecast, and makes doing this work interesting and fraught with danger when doing public estimates!
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