Soudelor damage consistent with a Category 3 typhoon

While the National Weather Service in Guam ruled out that Typhoon Soudelor brought in super typhoon or Category 5-strength winds when it hit Saipan last week, damage sustained by the island is consistent with a Category 3 typhoon.

This is stronger than earlier forecasted as Soudelor was only classified as a Category 2 as it was approaching the CNMI.

Chip Guard, warning coordination meteorologist of the NWS Forecast Office Guam, and Dr. Mark Lander of the Water and Environmental Research Institute arrived on Saipan Monday and went around the island to conduct their assessment.

The two meteorologists told Saipan Tribune in an interview yesterday that damage on the island as well as the pressure recorded was consistent with a Category 3—which has winds of up to 120 miles per hour and gusts of 150 miles per hour.

Prior to landfall, an update of 105 miles per hour maximum winds and 120 miles per hour gusts was given out by NWS.

They said that Category 3 is their baseline and it can also be strong as a Category 4 but not as strong as a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Lander said they ruled out super typhoon because there are damage that “they have to see” that they weren’t able to see on island.

Among these are “structural damage,” and despite Saipan being badly hit, most of the damage were “architectural damage.” They also pointed out that the storm surge was “negligible.”

Terrain interaction
While some residents comment that what they experienced was similar to a tornado, the meteorologists say there were none of that with Soudelor.

“All the stripes and patches of damage just come with the terrain,” Lander said.

“It’s not part of the typhoon doing that. It’s the wind interacting with the island,” he added.

“The terrain can do a lot of different things to the winds. Anytime you have a slope terrain, the winds accelerate up and they accelerate down,” Guard said.

Unique, small typhoon
Guard describes Soudelor as a “unique” typhoon.

“It’s an incredibly small storm, very intense. It’s a storm we really have not seen go over populated areas,” Guard said.

He pointed out that most typhoons are 20 miles high and 200 miles wide but Soudelor was as wide as it was high—even less than 20 miles in height and width.

“Our first shock was flying over the northern part of Tinian and not seeing a single piece of damage. The trees were just perfect. That shows you how incredibly small this storm was,” Guard said.

“We’ve seen these kinds of storms before and we kind of wondered what’s inside them because they got an eye so small the satellite has trouble resolving the eye. We call it the pinhole eye,” he added.

Guard said they really “don’t know what’s inside” and “how these things behave.”

Wrong forecast
Asked about being wrong with their forecast, Guard said they were indeed “wrong.”

“We did forecast it wrong. It’s called a forecast. We don’t know the answer but we give you the best information that we have at the time,” Guard said.

“All the weather agencies have the same answer and it just happened to be the wrong answer with regards to how fast it was intensifying,” he added.

However, Guard pointed out that they did expect it to intensify, that’s why they raised typhoon conditions in some parts of the CNMI even when Soudelor was just a tropical storm. He also said that they actually upgraded Soudelor to a typhoon before the Warning Center did.

“The rate that it was intensifying was much faster than what we expected it to intensify. So really, when the winds, when we realized how strong the winds were getting, it was really too late for you all to do anything except hunker down and wait until the worst of it passes,”

Guard said they don’t know how much information people in the CNMI were getting.

“We’re in Guam, we don’t really know how much information the people are getting,” he said.

With their assessment, the NWS will be having a report and will work with other people such as theoreticians in studying the typhoon.

“We’re going to have to work with some of our colleagues back in MIT and some of the universities to look at what can happen at a system, in a storm that has these characteristics. We’ve never seen one,” Guard said.