00:00Well, let's talk to Matthew Capucci, the senior meteorologist at MyRadar.
00:04Matthew, welcome. You've seen the pictures.
00:07What do you make of the scale and the extent of the devastation this extreme weather has caused in China?
00:15Well, there have been so many things going on at once, not only across China, but also in the Western
00:20Pacific.
00:21In China, of course, a high-end tornado, likely EF3 to EF4 damage,
00:25corresponding to winds over about 240 to 270-plus kilometers per hour, at least a dozen fatalities so far.
00:32And China does occasionally get tornadoes to this strength,
00:35but to see something like that just 70, 80 miles or kilometers east of downtown Wuhan
00:41in a very busy populous area shows how much property, how many people were exposed to this kind of devastation.
00:48The interesting thing, too, this tornado was associated not only with the remnants of a tropical cyclone,
00:54so there was a hurricane-type storm that came ashore,
00:56but you had that kind of moisture overlapping with an upper air disturbance that was of non-tropical origin,
01:03so two weather systems kind of coming together in a very destructive way, leading to this high-end tornado.
01:09That's the kind of thing we would see in Texas or Oklahoma in the United States,
01:12but to see that in China is a rare and very high-end event.
01:16How easy is it to forecast something like this?
01:19I can appreciate you can see rain on a radar, but how easy is it to predict how bad it's
01:25going to be?
01:28Well, when you get tornadoes like this, they're actually very small phenomena,
01:31and that's why a tornado is such a powerful thing.
01:34It's packing an incredible amount of power into such a small area.
01:37Generally speaking, we can forecast the potential for tornadic thunderstorms,
01:42rotating thunderstorms with tornadoes, a couple days in advance, but over a very broad area.
01:48Only in real time, 10, 20, 30 minutes in advance, can we say,
01:52yeah, this individual thunderstorm, maybe only 15 kilometers wide, is primed to produce a tornado,
01:58and then the tornado itself might only be one kilometer wide, if that.
02:02So it's kind of a series of cascading, zeroing in, if you will.
02:06Like, you start wide and you sort of narrow down, but realistically, even in the United States,
02:10you only get about 12 to 15 minutes notice on average that a tornado may be coming.
02:15And in China, the radar network, which we use to determine if a thunderstorm is rotating,
02:21is kind of coarser, more broad, and we just don't really have the warning system there that exists in the
02:25United States.
02:26And so for folks who were in harm's way, they may not have gotten the warning they would need to
02:31see shelter.
02:32If this wasn't bad enough for these communities, we understand there's more bad weather ahead.
02:40Yeah, we're also tracking a tropical cyclone, basically a hurricane in the western Pacific.
02:44It's a typhoon there.
02:45It is a Category 4 right now, winds of 220 to 250 kilometers per hour.
02:51It hit Rota, a U.S. territory and island with about 3,500 people, as a Category 5 equivalent.
02:57It decimated wood frame houses.
03:00It destroyed all the vegetation.
03:01And now it's moving west.
03:03It will eventually impact either the southernmost inhabited islands of Japan, Ishigaki, Takatomi, and Hatteruma,
03:08or perhaps far northern Taiwan with destructive winds over 170 kilometers per hour and a lot of rainfall.
03:16We're talking maybe half a meter plus.
03:17So we're not sure exactly where it's going to go yet,
03:19but anyone in Taipei should be paying very close attention, especially this upcoming weekend.
03:24Matthew, thank you.
03:25That's Matthew Capucci, the senior meteorologist at MyRadar.
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