Historical deadly typhoons in the Philippines

Occurrence of 1 ka-old corals on an uplifted reef terrace in west Luzon, Philippines: Implications for a prehistoric extreme wave event in the South China Sea region

“…The Philippines is also frequented by tropical cyclones (TC) which enter the country at an average of 19-20 TCs per year (Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) 2008). While the 2013 Typhoon (TY) Haiyan (local name: Super Typhoon Yolanda) remains to be the deadliest typhoon in modern meteorologic records to hit the country, the 1881 Haiphong typhoon that devastated Vietnam is also reported to have severely damaged the Philippines leaving thousands of casualties [e.g., (Ribera et al 2008;); Table 4]. As the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone, TY Haiyan generated a surge of 5-6 m (Tajima et al 2014) and run-up as high as 15 m (Kennedy et al 2017).…”

Reconstructing typhoons in Japan in the 1880s from documentary records

“…Linking the Japan historical chronologies to chronologies developed for China (Chan and Shi, 2000;Liu et al, 2001;Elsner and Liu, 2003;Fogarty et al, 2006), the Philippines (Ribera et al, 2005;García-Herrera et al, 2007;Ribera et al, 2008) and possibly Korea and Taiwan will make it possible to investigate longer-term patterns of typhoon formation and behaviour throughout the WNP. Combining data from many countries in the region will also make it possible to map historical typhoon tracks for the entire WNP to better understand the variability of typhoon behaviours over longer time periods under climatic conditions differing from those of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.…”

“…The diaries have daily entries covering periods of varying length between 1801 and 1892. In addition to the HWD, historical accounts of typhoons affecting Japan were obtained from four sources: Climate history of Japan (Central Weather Observatory and Ocean Weather Observatory, 1976), A historical aspect of natural disasters in Kyushu and Yamaguchi Prefecture (Kusakabe, 1959), A chronological aspect of the natural disasters in the Kanto District (Kusakabe, 1973), and an online database of typhoons in the Philippine Islands, 1566-1900(García-Herrera et al, 2008.…”

“…Chan and Shi (2000) used historical records from China to document typhoon landfalls for the period from 1491 to 1931 and Liu et al (2001) used similar Chinese records to extend the record of typhoon strikes in China back to 1000 AD. Elsner and Liu (2003) Ribera et al (2008) used the same dataset to chronicle the history of the deadliest typhoons that affected the Philippines. For Japan, Grossman and Zaiki (2007) used data from historical documents to reconstruct typhoon frequencies from 1801 to 1830 and to estimate the tracks of well-documented historical typhoons in the nineteenth century Zaiki, 2008, 2009).…”

Recent Advances in the Historical Climatology of the Tropics and Subtropics

“…The years 1660-80 and 1850-80, coinciding with two of the driest and coolest periods of the Little Ice Age in China (see above), appear to have been the most active on record. Ribera et al (2008) have explored the Catalogue of Typhoons (produced by the Spanish Jesuit Miguel Selga in the early twentieth century from an analysis of old chronicles) to identify the deadliest typhoons to affect the Philippines (Table 4). The most deadly was the storm that passed to the north of Manila between 20 and 26 September 1867 [at the heart of the period of enhanced Chinese typhoon activity identified by Liu et al (2001)] in which more than 1800 people died as a result of catastrophic flooding of the Abra River.…”