Typhoon Haiyan: What are the strongest and most destructive tropical cyclones on record?

Meteorologists are still working out just how powerful Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the city of Tacloban and nearby areas, was. Cyclones (called "typhoons" in the Pacific and "hurricanes" in the Atlantic) are destructive for a variety of factors. Wind speeds are what determine whether a cyclone is considered Category 5, the highest rating, but tide and when and where a storm makes landfall determines the danger to life and limb. Here are a few big cyclones.

1. Typhoon Tip, 1979

NOAA.gov
Super Typhoon Tip.

The US National Weather Service considers 1979's Typhoon Tip to be the most powerful cyclone ever recorded. On Oct. 12 of that year, a US government Hercules reconnaissance plane flying out of Anderson Air Base in Guam recorded winds of 190 miles per hour from inside the storm, and at its height the typhoon was roughly 1,350 miles across – about the distance from New York City to Lincoln, Neb. That same day, the pressure at sea level beneath the storm was at 870 milibars, the lowest ever recorded. (Low pressure helps generate high winds). Bob Korose, the pilot of the Hercules that day, described the wind's effect on the plane:

"Generally you just go in as straight as you can, unless you’re able to take advantage of a weak spot in the typhoon," Korose told the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Log in 1998. But Typhoon Tip was a different beast from usual. "“It’s a solid wall cloud, so there’s no easy way in. As you head for the eye, you constantly have to make corrections for the winds. You’re getting blown sideways at 150 m.p.h., or even more than that, so you have a lot of correction. In other words, the nose of your aircraft isn’t pointing to where you are going. You see on the radar that the eye is right straight ahead of you, but actually you point off to the left side as you’re going in because you have such a drift to the right from the crosswinds spinning into the storm."

The good news about Tip is that it missed Guam and had weakened by the time it made landfall on the southern Japanese island of Honshu on Oct. 19. Still, the storm claimed the lives of 42 people ashore in Japan and 44 fisherman at sea. 

1 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.