Chapala NASA image
released on 31.10.15
Earlier reports suggested
that Cyclone Chapala was heading for an
extremely rare landfall at hurricane strength along the coast of war-torn Yemen.
While wind damage will be a threat near the point of landfall, the bigger
concern will be extremely heavy rainfall in a normally arid region, leading to
life-threatening flash floods in a country already suffering a major
humanitarian crisis stemming from years of violent conflict.
Chapala was a
Category 3 equivalent storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale as of
Monday morning (mainland U.S. time). It had rapidly intensified to a high-end
Category 4 early Friday and remained in that Category through most of Saturday.
This made Chapala the strongest tropical system so far south in the Arabian Sea
on record. One would wonder for sure - how
often "tropical cyclone" and the "Arabian Peninsula" appear
in the same sentence.
First, hurricane
specialist Michael Lowry says the head of the Cyclone Warning Division at the
India Meteorological Department cited two "severe cyclonic storms" -
those with winds of at least 55 mph - made landfall in Yemen in May 1959 and
May 1960. Weather Underground's Dr. Jeff Masters says Tropical Depression Three
in 2008 claimed 90 lives and was responsible for $400 million in damage. However, there is no record of a cyclone of
Category 4 strength or stronger tracking as far south as Chapala in the Arabian
Sea. Despite all this, Arabian Sea
tropical cyclones are not as unusual as they sound.
Today’s news
reports state that rare cyclone Chapala hit Yeman and was heading for al Qaeda
run city. Amateur pictures and videos on
social media, which could not be immediately authenticated showed torrents of
water washing through the streets of the Socotra provincial capital Hadibu. "Three
people were killed, around 100 have been injured," said a local official,
without describing the causes of death. "Around 1,500 families have fled
to the interior and to the mountains. There's absolutely no help coming from
the outside."
Chapala, a rare
tropical cyclone, killed three people and injured 100 on the Yemeni island of
Socotra Monday, and is headed for an Al Qaeda-controlled town near the port of
Mukalla on the mainland. Situated in the Arabian Sea and slightly larger than
Majorca or Rhode Island, isolated Socotra is home to hundreds of exotic plant
species found nowhere else on earth. Its 50,000 residents speak their own
language. Long remote, the island has become especially cut off from mainland
Yemen by a seven-month war there between Iran-allied fighters and a coalition
of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.
Yemen, generally
arid and hot, receives relatively little rainfall and the infrastructure in the
Arabian Peninsula's poorest country is ill-equipped built to handle large
deluges. Slightly weakened, the storm is expected to hit the mainland on
Tuesday morning near the port of Mukalla, which has been run by a tribal
council and Al Qaeda militants since the army and government institutions
withdrew in April.
Forecasts late last
week indicated the cyclone would strike the coast close to neighboring Oman's
second city Salalah while avoiding populous areas of Yemen, which has never
experienced such a storm. But its latest trajectory takes in southern Yemen,
weakening as it bears down on the capital Sanaa in the north.
Tropical cyclones
in the Indian Ocean basin, which includes the Arabian Sea, are simply known as
"cyclones" or "cyclonic storms" regardless of strength.
There are no special terms applied based on reaching a certain intensity, but
the India Meteorological Department does apply various adjectives such as
"severe" or "very severe" to describe different intensity
levels.
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
2nd Noc. 2015 @ 22.45 hrs.
