Hurricanes, Typhoons Keep Buzzsawing The Pacific

Incredible clouds around the eye of
Super Typhoon Genevieve. Click on the
image to make it bigger and easier
to see the detail.  

It's quite a year out in the Pacific Ocean this year for severe tropical weather.

I guess Pacific really is the wrong word to describe that ocean.

We all heard about Hurricane Iselle, which hit Hawaii as a strong tropical storm yesterday. 

It dumped up to 14 inches of rain on the Big Island of Hawaii. There's been a lot of flooding, mudslides, rock slides, structural damage from wind and trees down.

I haven't heard of any deaths yet, which is a great thing.

Then there's Hurricane Julio, which is going to harass Hawaii, but not hit it. It looks like Julio is going to pass far enough north of Hawaii to only give minor effects. Which is good, because they have their hands full with the aftermath of Iselle.

Hurricane Genevieve crossed the International Date Line the other day as it traveled west. That changed its name to Typhoon Genevieve. Typhoons and hurricanes are the same thing, they're just have different names in different parts of the world.

Genevieve became a super typhoon, meaning it has sustained winds of 150 mph or more. It looks like Genevieve is not a big threat to any land areas at the moment.

Typhoon Halong was trashing southwestern Japan as of Saturday, with severe flooding in that part of the country.  The area had already been hit by torrential rains and typhoons, and the flooding from Halong is expected to get extremely scary, and turn into among the worst Japan has seen.

Rain was reported falling at a rate of three to four inches an hour in some places.

Not good.