By Andrew Freedman and Johnny Simon23 October 2015 (Mashable) – UPDATED 2:45 p.m. ET: Since this story was posted, yet another storm — Hurricane Patricia — in the eastern Pacific intensified to Category 4 status [and then, Category 5 –Des], making it 22 Category 4 and 5 storms that have formed so far this year. […]
By Seth Borenstein24 October 2015 WASHINGTON (AP) – Hurricane Patricia zoomed from tropical storm to record-beater in 30 hours flat like a jet-fueled sports car. Why? The Pacific storm had just the right ingredients. Plenty of warm water provided the energy what meteorologists call explosive intensification. The air was much moister than usual, adding yet […]
By Christopher Sherman, with additional reporting by Peter Orsi, and E. Eduardo Castillo23 October 2015 MANZANILLO, Mexico (AP) – Hurricane Patricia headed toward southwestern Mexico Friday as a monster Category 5 storm, the strongest ever in the Western Hemisphere that forecasters said could make a “potentially catastrophic landfall” later in the day. Residents of a […]
22 October 2015 (AFP) – The death toll from a ferocious typhoon in the Philippines climbed to 54 on Thursday, as home-wrecking floods shifted downstream to coastal villages, displacing tens of thousands of residents. Inundations from torrential weekend rains in mountain regions caused by Typhoon Koppu cascaded into coastal fishing and farming villages, submerging them […]
19 October 2015 (AFP) – Residents of flooded farming villages in the Philippines were trapped on their rooftops on Monday and animals floated down fast-rising rivers, as the death toll from Typhoon Koppu climbed to 16. Koppu, the second strongest storm to hit the disaster-plagued Southeast Asian archipelago this year, had also forced more than […]
By Andrew Freedman17 October 2015 (Mashable) – Super Typhoon Koppu, known as Typhoon Lando in the Philippines, made landfall close to 1 a.m. local time on Sunday morning near the town of Casiguran in Luzon’s Aurora Province, as a powerful Category 4 or 5 storm. The storm was on the cusp of being declared a […]
By Ben Doherty 11 October 2015 (The Guardian) – Two dozen people have already died from hunger and drinking contaminated water in drought-stricken Papua New Guinea, but the looming El Niño crisis could leave more than four million people across the Pacific without enough food or clean water. The El Niño weather pattern – when […]
4 September 2015 (Insurance Journal) – The monthly report for August from Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting catastrophe model development team cites the “severe drought conditions” in the western U.S. as resulting in “economic losses expected to reach at least $3.0 billion – mostly attributable to agricultural damage in California.” Several Caribbean and Central American nations […]
By Michael Muskal31 August 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – For a time over the weekend, three powerful Category 4 hurricanes churned in the central and eastern Pacific basins at the same time, an event that is believed a meteorological first in the ocean region and another sign that the forces of El Niño are stirring […]
14 August 2015 (NCDP) – Researchers at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) and the University of Washington have published a new study focused on the public health implications of climate change. The article explores climate change impacts on human health in the U.S. Gulf Coast and has implications for this and other […]
