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Typhoon Millennium
Fri May 28, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hurricanes used to land on the doorstep of coastal residents like door-to-door
salesmen—not much warning at all. Now they’re more like a rock band on a world
tour.
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.
Today, you might hear about a developing hurricane while it’s just a blob of clouds in
the Atlantic. And by the time it hits shore, everyone knows its name: Andrew, Floyd,
Opal, Mitch. Before radio and TV, the only people who had intimate experience with
these storms were: sailors, fishermen, and coastal residents.
Not many other folks bothered to take note of these tropical cyclones. But in China, the
historical record extends back thousands of years: some of the world’s oldest weather
records. A geographer from America visiting China has been pouring through library
stacks, trying to learn more about the hundreds of typhoons that have struck China over
the last millennium.
Kam-Biu Liu has focused his work in Guangdong Province— which actually looks a bit
like the US south coast, if you cut off Florida. With Hong Kong in the middle of its
coastline, Guangdong is a fast-growing region, and one at high risk from typhoons. Liu
found that Pacific typhoons tend to strike China during active periods that last about 50
years.
Oddly enough, China’s busiest period for typhoons this millennium was from 1660 to
1680, and that’s right when the sun was at its quietest. Why would this globally chilly
period bring so many cyclones to China? It’s possible that the cool pattern pushed the
storms into the coast instead of allowing them to move out to sea. These and other
ideas are being explored as part of a new scientific discipline that has a dramatic
name: paleotempestology.
The Weather Notebook is supported generously by Subaru of America and the
National Science Foundation. We are produced by the Mount Washington Observatory,
online at www.mountwashington.org.
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