Category 5 typhoon in Pacific sees winds leap 95 mph in 24 hours
Super Typhoon Bolaven is a fiercely powerful Category 5 storm currently roaming the Western Pacific. Packing sustained winds to 180 mph and gusts to 215 mph, it is the Earth’s second-strongest storm this year. The storm is centered more than 2,000 miles east-northeast of the Philippines and is heading northward over open waters.
The storm intensified with breakneck speed, its top winds increasing 95 mph in just 24 hours, joining a slew of other storms that rapidly strengthened over record-warm ocean waters this year.
Bolaven marks this year’s eighth Category 5-equivalent storm; one such storm has formed in every tropical ocean basin for the first time on record.
These hurricane-strength storms have different names depending on where they form, but they produce the same effects. In the Southern Hemisphere, they are mostly called cyclones, while they are referred to as typhoons in the western Pacific Ocean and hurricanes in the Atlantic.
The large number of these top-tier storms this year is connected to a combination of human-caused climate change and the El Niño climate pattern, which have heated ocean waters to record levels.
Bolaven is expected to remain over the North Pacific, avoiding land as it slowly weakens upon encountering cooler waters. However, the system will still influence the weather half a world away. It’s expected that Bolaven will slam into the jet stream, bending it and infusing it with energy and ultimately affecting the weather over North America.
For now, Bolaven remains a hazard mainly to mariners and aviation.
Storm’s rapid intensification
Bolaven began as a disorganized swirl but underwent one of the most impressive bursts of rapid intensification on record between Tuesday and Wednesday. It exploded from a Category 1 storm with 90 mph winds to a Category 5-equivalent violent typhoon with 160 mph winds in just 12 hours. That’s four times the rate needed to qualify as “rapid intensification.”
In 24 hours, its wind speeds leaped 95 mph. “This is not far below the world record for 24-hour intensification of 120 mph, held by Hurricane Patricia of 2015,” Jeff Masters and Bob Henson wrote at Yale Climate Connections.
There is a strong link between the frequency of rapid intensification and the effects of human-caused climate warming, because storms depend on warm ocean waters to strengthen. Water temperatures in the Western Pacific are about 1 to 3 degrees above average.
In October 2019, Super Typhoon Hagibis underwent a similar bout of rapid intensification far southeast of Japan, its winds jumping 115 mph in 22 hours.
It later made landfall on Japan’s Izu Peninsula near Shizuoka as a Category 2-equivalent storm.
With maximum sustained winds of 180 mph, Bolaven narrowly trails Mawar as this year’s most intense storm. Mawar’s peak winds reached 185 mph in late May as it also tracked northeast of Guam.
On infrared satellite, Bolaven has a striking appearance and has no imperfection from a meteorological standpoint. Bolaven embodies a textbook structure with a well-defined eye and towering thunderstorms surrounding it.
Lightning has been present continuously in and around the system’s eye, yet another sign of a top-tier storm. Its symmetry is equally foreboding.
Influence on North American weather
Bolaven is expected to remain a Category 5 storm for the next 24 hours as it churns first north then northeast. In the two to five days that follow, it will accelerate to the northeast and broaden in size while its peak winds decrease over cooler waters.
Into early next week, it will begin to tap into jet stream energy, transitioning into a powerful nontropical storm. It will simultaneously be consumed by the jet stream – a river of swiftly moving winds in the upper atmosphere. That will both nudge the jet stream northward and add energy into it.
Computer models project that Bolaven will help amplify a ridge of high pressure, or northward deviation of the jet stream, across the western Lower 48 around Oct. 19. That will lead to pleasant weather and above-average temperatures in western North America. The corollary to that, however, is that the increasingly wavy jet stream will probably dive southward over the Plains and eastern United States, allowing cool Canadian air and storminess to spill down over much of eastern North America.
Other tropical cyclones
Meteorologists are also tracking other systems around the world that are also benefiting from warmer-than-normal waters.
In the Eastern Pacific, Hurricane Lidia struck just south of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on Tuesday evening. It packed 140 mph winds at landfall as a Category 4 – tied for the third-strongest storm on record to make landfall on Mexico’s west coast.
Like Bolaven, Lidia exhibited extreme rapid intensification, its peak winds jumping 70 mph in the 24 hours before coming ashore.
The Associated Press reported that Lidia killed one person and injured two more before it quickly weakened inland as its circulation was torn apart by the high terrain of the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains.
In the Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center found that Tropical Storm Sean formed Tuesday night but is expected to remain over open waters.
On Wednesday morning, the storm was located about 780 miles west-southwest of the Cape Verde islands. It was a minimal tropical storm, with winds up to 40 mph, moving west-northwest at 13 mph. It is not expected to meaningfully strengthen as it roams the open Atlantic because of hostile high-altitude winds.
Sean marks the 19th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. “Only three other Atlantic seasons on record have had 19+ Atlantic named storms by Oct. 11: 2005 (21 named storms), 2020 (25 named storms) and 2021 (20 named storms),” tweeted Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University.
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Jason Samenow contributed to this report.