Good morning everyone. While activity has certainly picked up in the Atlantic after two and a half months of near complete dormancy, the Western Pacific, the most prolific of all the tropical basins on the planet, continues to produce huge storms. As of 8 PM on Thursday evening (Far East/Asian time), Sepat, which is a Malaysian word for a freshwater fish, had winds of 115 miles per hour with gusts as high as 140 miles per hour. The eye of the typhoon was centered some 375 miles to the southeast of Taiwan’s southeastern coastal city of Taitung.

According to EarthTimes.org, Typhoon Sepat is now moving to the Northwest at approximately 12 miles per hour. The storm system, which has come on the heels of two other recent typhoons, Pabuk and Usagi, has forced Taiwan’s major airlines to either cancel or reschedule both domestic and international flights. The storm was noted by the Hindu News Update Service as being a Super Typhoon at one point with an estimated 135 mph winds, and gusts as high as 155 mph. Later reports courtesy of Bloomberg News Service indicated that the typhoon did indeed cross the maximum possible threshold of Category Five intensity on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.

Waves off the coast of Taiwan were as high as 46 feet while winds extended some 100 miles from the storm center. The Taiwanese government issued a land and sea warning for the storm on Thursday as Sepat drew closer to the Nationalist Chinese outpost. Since records have been taken, the Western Pacific has probably been the most active with often twenty storms or more per season. In comparison, the Atlantic Basin usually averages ten storms per season, and the Eastern Pacific gets at least 15 storms per year. Last year was particularly active in the Western Pacific thanks to the presence of El Nino. Pabuk struck Taiwan a little more than a week or so ago with winds of tropical storm strength at 60 mph, and gusts in excess of 75 miles per hour.

Several days before that, Typhoon Usagi made its third landfall during its lifespan as it came ashore along the coast of Japan. Winds were as high as 76 mph, which made it a Category One storm according to the Saffir-Simpson Scale. Back in July, Typhoon Man-yi struck the Japanese islands of Kyushu and Shikoku killing several people. Moving westward across the Asian continent into the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea region, where a couple of cyclones have impacted Oman on the Arabian Peninsula and Iran back in June. So, while the Atlantic has been sleeping, and the Eastern Pacific has been active, but fairly harmless, other parts of the earth’s oceans have been raging with tropical fury in 2007.