Super Typhoon Saomai

[phantom power]

That's probably going to leave a mark.



http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/tracking/wp200608.html

[Atman]

1. You may as well have just posted a blank square!

What the hell am I looking at? Is that Japan I'm looking at? You have to do a LOT of digging to find one reference to the actual named location instead of just coordinate. But is sure looks Japan-ish.

[phantom power]

2. The largish blob in the upper left is China.

[mainegreen]

4. What? Didn't you memorize atlases as a kid like the rest of us?

:P

[megatherium]

3. A little more detail.

Google News scared up the following for me.

Heavy rainstorms brought by Typhoon Saomai will hit the coastal and southern parts of east China's Zhejiang Province, the provincial meteorological observatory has forecast.

Heavy rains will hit Wenzhou, Taizhou, Ningbo and the eastern part of Lishui in Zhejiang from Wednesday night till Friday, with winds gusting 70 to 120 km per hour, said the observatory.

The center of Saomai, the name of the planet Venus in Vietnamese, was located at sea 1,000 km east-southeast of Wenzhou, with wind speeds of up to 144 km per hour at 5:00 a.m. Wednesday. The typhoon is still gathering strength and its center is moving northwest at a speed of 25 to 30 km per hour, said the observatory.

SNIP

Typhoon Saomai, the eighth to hit China this year, is expected to make landfall Thursday afternoon or night between central Zhejiang and the northern coastal area of neighboring Fujian Province.

My Chinese geography is weak -- what is in harm's way there?

http://english.eastday.com/eastday/englishedition/nation/userobject1ai2240842.html

[Dead_Parrot]

5. Well, no great walls or terracotta armies...

but 47,000,000 Chinese are going to get wet. And it looks quite hilly, so the rains will all be concentrated into the valleys then on to the coastal cities like a big, wet hammer.

It could be nasty.

[Nihil]

6. Hmmm ... straight down the valleys ... into the faulty dams?

Or am I getting my Chinese valleys mixed up?

Visions of a repeat of the cascading dam failures of 1975?
26,000 died straight away and ~145,000 from the aftermath
(disease, etc.).

(Hopefully I'm just getting geographically confused)

[Dead_Parrot]

7. The same way a hot knife goes into butter, I suspect.

That was the Banqiao dam (and others) in Henan - Different rivers, roughly the same neck of the woods (and also a typhoon).

Deep joy...

[phantom power]

8. Damn, that was a cat-4 landfall.