While the National Weather Service in Guam ruled out that Typhoon Soudelor brought in super typhoon or Category 5-strength winds when it hit Saipan last week, damage sustained by the island is consistent with a Category 3 typhoon.<\/p>\n
This is stronger than earlier forecasted as Soudelor was only classified as a Category 2 as it was approaching the CNMI.<\/p>\n
Chip Guard, warning coordination meteorologist of the NWS Forecast Office Guam, and Dr. Mark Lander of the Water and Environmental Research Institute arrived on Saipan Monday and went around the island to conduct their assessment.<\/p>\n
The two meteorologists told Saipan Tribune in an interview yesterday that damage on the island as well as the pressure recorded was consistent with a Category 3\u2014which has winds of up to 120 miles per hour and gusts of 150 miles per hour.<\/p>\n
Prior to landfall, an update of 105 miles per hour maximum winds and 120 miles per hour gusts was given out by NWS.<\/p>\n
They said that Category 3 is their baseline and it can also be strong as a Category 4 but not as strong as a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.<\/p>\n
Lander said they ruled out super typhoon because there are damage that \u201cthey have to see\u201d that they weren\u2019t able to see on island.<\/p>\n
Among these are \u201cstructural damage,\u201d and despite Saipan being badly hit, most of the damage were \u201carchitectural damage.\u201d They also pointed out that the storm surge was \u201cnegligible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Terrain interaction<\/strong> \u201cAll the stripes and patches of damage just come with the terrain,\u201d Lander said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not part of the typhoon doing that. It\u2019s the wind interacting with the island,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cThe terrain can do a lot of different things to the winds. Anytime you have a slope terrain, the winds accelerate up and they accelerate down,\u201d Guard said.<\/p>\n Unique, small typhoon<\/strong> \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly small storm, very intense. It\u2019s a storm we really have not seen go over populated areas,\u201d Guard said.<\/p>\n He pointed out that most typhoons are 20 miles high and 200 miles wide but Soudelor was as wide as it was high\u2014even less than 20 miles in height and width.<\/p>\n \u201cOur first shock was flying over the northern part of Tinian and not seeing a single piece of damage. The trees were just perfect. That shows you how incredibly small this storm was,\u201d Guard said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve seen these kinds of storms before and we kind of wondered what\u2019s inside them because they got an eye so small the satellite has trouble resolving the eye. We call it the pinhole eye,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Guard said they really \u201cdon\u2019t know what\u2019s inside\u201d and \u201chow these things behave.\u201d<\/p>\n Wrong forecast<\/strong> \u201cWe did forecast it wrong. It\u2019s called a forecast. We don\u2019t know the answer but we give you the best information that we have at the time,\u201d Guard said.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the weather agencies have the same answer and it just happened to be the wrong answer with regards to how fast it was intensifying,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n However, Guard pointed out that they did expect it to intensify, that\u2019s why they raised typhoon conditions in some parts of the CNMI even when Soudelor was just a tropical storm. He also said that they actually upgraded Soudelor to a typhoon before the Warning Center did.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rate that it was intensifying was much faster than what we expected it to intensify. So really, when the winds, when we realized how strong the winds were getting, it was really too late for you all to do anything except hunker down and wait until the worst of it passes,\u201d<\/p>\n Guard said they don\u2019t know how much information people in the CNMI were getting.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re in Guam, we don\u2019t really know how much information the people are getting,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n With their assessment, the NWS will be having a report and will work with other people such as theoreticians in studying the typhoon.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to work with some of our colleagues back in MIT and some of the universities to look at what can happen at a system, in a storm that has these characteristics. We\u2019ve never seen one,\u201d Guard said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While the National Weather Service in Guam ruled out that Typhoon Soudelor brought in super…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[26,51,758,67],"class_list":["post-207980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-cnmi","tag-guam","tag-nws","tag-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207980\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWhile some residents comment that what they experienced was similar to a tornado, the meteorologists say there were none of that with Soudelor.<\/p>\n
\nGuard describes Soudelor as a \u201cunique\u201d typhoon.<\/p>\n
\nAsked about being wrong with their forecast, Guard said they were indeed \u201cwrong.\u201d<\/p>\n