Typhoon Bavi isn’t as impressive as it was, with the eye covered by high clouds as the sun sets this evening (Pacific time, morning of the 9th US time).
The forecast from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) is for the storm to pass north of Taiwan and hit the densely populated areas south of Shanghai. As a reminder, JTWC the US Military’s combined Navy/USAF forecast center, who are responsible for for tropical cyclone forecasts for US agencies outside the responsibility of the National Hurricane Center. Here is my TAOS(tm) TC/Lachesis model for the storm impacts based on the JTWC forecast:
On this track, depending on the economic model and how you convert between relative costs to rebuild in China vs. the US (which isn’t simply multiplying by the exchange rate, but involves figuring out how much it costs to do things in each country in purchasing power parity terms and other factors), the storm could cause between $25 and $55 Billion in impacts.
Taiwan is on the edge of the damage swath, with Taipei likely to see high winds and power outages. But the main impacts will be on the mainland. Bavi could cause storm surges up to 5 meters (17 feet) in some of the bays and inlets along the shoreline. Here are zoomed in views of the area for impacts (left) and storm surge(right).
The Wenszhou-Taizhou corridor is likely to see extensive damage. Wenzhou is a major port and industrial city. Taizhou, which might see very high storm surges, is famous for the “Taizhou Model,”which refers to the city’s economic development approach that used local government support along with private sector initiatives, and is considered the birthplace of private enterprise in China.
Administrative note: those are the last Google Earth images you will see on the blog. Enki has had a long relationship with using that package. It has been a valuable tool for showing the impacts of natural hazards (my mapping system even won an award from Google), but recent changes by Google have made it (and their search engine) increasingly problematic to use. A lot of it boils down to so-called “AI” and the quest by these companies to siphon up all the data, knowledge, and techniques they can and use it for both “training purposes” for the algorithms as well as for their own internal usage, virtually never with attribution much less compensation. We increasingly live in a world where tech companies are stealing the creative and intellectual output of humans, automating and monetizing it, then using (and often distorting and dumbing it down) for their own purposes. All at the cost of the potential and quality of life of humans.
You should resent – and actively resist – this trend.
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Re Google and the rest of the AI/military/industrial complex: The line “You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain” seems to apply.
Sorry about that. There’s a whole discussion that needs to happen if “rule of law” and “high-trust legal frameworks” are to last. But it probably won’t.
I’m more and more leaning towards a Bulterian Jihad scenario …
You are so right on how the business interests related to AI are turning everything upside down, for the worst, not the best.