Typhoons in the Philippine Islands, 1901-1934

Abstract

A chronology of typhoons and storms in the Western North Pacific is presented, based on the previous work of Miguel Selga, a former director of the Manila Observatory. It includes data about 863 typhoons, storms and depressions over the western Pacific area between 1901 and 1934. The chronology provides information covering a wide area, from Guam to the Gulf of Tonkin and from the equator to Japan. The resulting typhoon series has been included in a database, which is freely accessible, and annual typhoon occurrence and trajectories are also shown. A comparison of the typhoon passage frequency over the Philippine area with a previously available chronology was made to assure the validity of Selga's observations, showing good agreement. KEY WORDS: Climate variability · Typhoons · Western Pacific Ocean Resale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisherClim Res 29: [85][86][87][88][89][90] 2005 described and made available. Selga's (1935) original work consists of a chronology of typhoons in the vicinity of The Philippines lasting from the 16th century to 1934; it is divided into 2 periods: 1564-1900 and 1901-1934. The first period contains mostly reports from historical records and has been analyzed in R. Garcia-Herrera et al. (unpubl.). The second period includes mostly direct instrumental observations made by the Manila Observatory and its associated network. The present paper analyses the 1901-1934 period. During this period, the Manila Observatory, founded and supervised by the Jesuits, acted as the meteorological agency of the islands (Udías 2003). In the final section of our paper, an analysis of the geographical probability distribution of typhoon-passage frequency was performed, with the aim of detecting differences between Selga's data and analyses conducted in the instrumental period. The recent work by Ho et al. (2004) was used to provide a comparison with Selga's chronology. DATA AND METHODSThe data presented and analyzed in this paper have been extracted from the Catalogue of Typhoons 1348Typhoons -1934, which is an addendum to Selga (1935). It includes information for 863 events, of which 619 are included as typhoons, the others being catalogued as storms or depressions. The starting date of 1901 was selected in this study, because this is then when the US Administration entrusted control of the newly created Philippines Weather Bureau to the Manila Observatory. The meteorological service was established with 9 first-class, 25 second-class and 17 third-class stations, though not all of them were actually operational. Additionally, meteorological information was shared among different services/observatories, including ones located in Taiwan, Shanghai and Manila (Udías 2003). Thus, the chronology is not limited to The Philippines but covers most of the WNP.All the events listed were direct observations from one of the observatories; their descriptions include complete dating information. As an example, 4 reports have been included in Table 1. The first repor...

A Historical Analog of 2005 Hurricane Vince

“…Chenoweth and Landsea (2004) employ largely the same variety and type of source material (newspapers, personal accounts, and instrumental data) as has been called upon in the preparation of the current paper. Elsewhere, Chinese and Spanish documentary sources have also been used to obtain chronologies of typhoons in the western Pacific basin (Liu et al 2001;Ribera et al 2005;Garcia-Herrera et al 2007). …”

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.…”

Historical deadly typhoons in the Philippines

“…The Jesuits arrived in the Philippines in the sixteenth century and played an active role both as missionaries and as natural scientists. In fact they founded the Manila Observatory and its associated network of meteorological stations in the second half of the nineteenth century and managed it until it became part of the Philippines National Weather Service after World War II (Udias, 2003;Ribera et al, 2005) …”

“…But typhoons over oceanic sectors are not so well documen ted although historical archives have been used to extend typhoon chronologies over the Philippines and part of the northwestern Pacific basin (NWP). See Ribera et al (2005) and García-Herrera et al (2007b) for details on this series, compiled by the Jesuit Miguel Selga in the mid1930s. The aim of this article, however, is to identify further deadly typhoons occurring in the Philip pines as derived from Selga's chronology.…”

“…Among them, historical archives have proven useful to produce annually resolved series over different TC-prone areas. As an example, 500-year-long hurricane occurrence series over the Caribbean area have been reconstructed using records extracted from colonial archives, kept both in Europe and in America (Millás 1968;García-Herrera et al, 2005, 2007aChenoweth, 2006). TC chronologies from historical records over other TC-prone areas are not so detailed.…”