AUGUST 5, 2017, SATURDAY
The storm is intensifying. Typhoon NORU is feeding hungrily off the 30 degrees Celsius warm waters off the southern Japan coast. It is turning into a category 2 hurricane with winds, sustained, of 150 kmph, gusting upto 200 kmph.
It is roughly 125 kilometres south of Ibusuki, a little town on the southern tip of Kyushu island. NORU will take about 18 hours to travel that distance for landfall into mainland Japan, tomorrow morning at 9 AM local time (about 0100 UTC, Sunday).
The storm will slam head on into Ibusuki as a category 2 storm.
As said earlier, it is a slow moving storm at present. So Kyushu will bear for a long time the torrential rains and strong gusts as NORU takes its own sweet time walking by.
After slicing through the eastern coast of Kyushu, the storm will pass through western Shikoku, onto southwest Honshu before entering the Sea of Japan as a weakening tropical storm on Tuesday, August 8, 2017.
So a large swathe of southern Japan is in a thorough drenching, landslides, flooding, and wind-caused damage for almost 48 hours, Sunday morning to early Tuesday morning.
We have relied on the track forecast as laid down by the European model, ECMWF. The JTWC largely agrees. But the HWRF (Hurricane Weather Research Forecasting) model has serious difference of opinion with the JTWC and ECMWF. It believes NORU will nudge along the eastern coast of Japan before swinging back into the Pacific Ocean off Tokyo albeit greatly weakened.
SEE HWRF TRACK.....
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