Typhoon modelling studies done by researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and two United States institutes have found that coastal cities such as Thailand’s Bangkok, Myanmar’s Yangon and Hai Phong in Vietnam are likely to suffer from longer-lasting and more powerful cyclones.
Typhoons in Southeast Asia are expected to intensify more quickly, move northwards towards places such as China and the Korean peninsula, and slow down on land – causing more damage in highly populated coastal areas and beyond.
“As our waters gain more temperature, tropical cyclones are going to start to occur in regions that previously didn’t have them much,” Professor Benjamin Horton, director of NTU’s Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), says.
“South-east Asia has a high frequency of tropical cyclones, but what we noticed is that the South China Sea is going to get hotter and hotter. So you’re going to start to get tropical cyclones farther northwards along the China coast and South Korea more frequently.”
In both medium and high greenhouse gas emission scenarios, the researchers’ models found that increasingly, typhoons will form over the South China Sea and make landfall north.
At the same time, fewer cyclones are expected to originate over the waters east of the Philippines.
Currently, most typhoons brew over the Western Pacific, which includes the waters east of the Philippines, according to Dr Dhrubajyoti Samanta, senior research fellow at EOS and another co-author of the study.
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