West Pacific Typhoon Season Is Coming !!

The Pacific Ocean covers a vast area of the earth, about 30% of the planet's surface and a larger area than all the world's land masses put together. This is a water planet and the Pacific is the world's largest body of water.

 Surfers are familiar with the seasonal swells from the South Pacific that affect Hawaii, California, Mexico, Central, and South America in the northern hemisphere summer, and the winter swell season for the north Pacific that impacts many of the same locations with seasonal groundswell in the opposite time of year. 

   There is another area of the Pacific that has a distinct swell season that can produce world-class waves much less familiar to American surfers - the western Pacific, where typhoon season from July to November can produce huge cyclonic storms and powerful groundswells which paste the coastlines of pacific Indonesia, The Philippines, China, Japan, both Koreas, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the islands of the Russian Far East with waves, many of which go unridden.

Typhoons generally form in the region of the Western Pacific Warm Pool, a large area north of the equator with some of the world's warmest surface waters. Clearly visible on any ocean surface temperature graphic, warm surface water is essential to the formation of tropical storms, the warmer the better.

A typical western Pacific typhoon may form in the area south of Guam, then slowly track to the west, building in size and intensity. Ideal conditions include warm surface waters, lack of strong upper level winds, and no previous systems for a week or two. The heavy rain, cloud cover, and churning action from a previous system will cool the surface waters, thus inhibiting the formation of new systems in the same area until the waters have warmed.

If everything goes well, and a cluster of thunderstorms associated with a surface low pressure is established, it becomes a tropical depression. Once surface convergence occurs and a positive feedback loop is established, these thunderstorms become unified into one developing system with divergence aloft. Then, the storm will be large enough to start to spin counter-clockwise in response to the Coriolis Effect of the earth's rotation; and when winds exceed 74 mph, a Category 1 Typhoon is established and gets a name. The scale tops out at Category 5, known as a Supertyphoon, with sustained winds over
150 mph.