July 29, 2018
Japan threatened with continued, ominous weather phenomenons in hot summer
Japan's Meteorological Agency has been busy issuing unprecedentedly strong warnings and alerts this summer in light of a host of unusual weather occurrences.
The agency has introduced new, even stronger warning patterns for an impending climate-related danger. The agency sometimes uses such wordings as "The impending danger is an inexperienced one, or what we have not seen in the past 50 years or so." This is part of efforts to remind people more of the seriousness of floods, landslides and other climate disasters in recent years, but their efforts stopped short of minimizing the damage of heavy rainfalls in widely scattered areas of western and southwestern Japan early in July.
The mishap claimed more than 200 lives, including the elderly and kids who were slow or unable in evacuating to shelters and other safer places.
The latest torrential rain was a "a new type of disaster to which "our past experience cannot be used," said people well informed with the series of recent climate change around Japan. More recent and to be more irregular, this season's 12th typhoon came to hit the Japanese Archipelago from the east.
The typhoon was born in the western Pacific far south of Japan July 25 and quickly moved northward toward Japan, and then, it began turning anticlockwise to the west around the edge of a cold vortex, which had emerged south of Japan following the meandering of the westerlies.
In the medium-latitude Asian climate zone around Japan, the weather usually comes from the west on the prevailing western winds. "What a strange rain storm! The typhoon this time has come from the east," said people in concerned areas.
There was no fatal damage following the storm, but it played havoc with areas so far believed to be more resilient to disasters, bringing heavy rain and strong winds to bays opening to the east or the eastern sides of mountains.
The typhoon came amid weeks of unusually hot weather in many areas of Japan. The temperature rises from time to time to around 40 degrees centigrade at not a few places across Japan. This has left dozens of people dead because of the heatstroke.
A Meteorological Agency official recently declared that the abnormally hot weather is "a kind of disaster."
Japan's political leaders stress on various occasions that Japan must make greater efforts to make itself more proof to natural disasters, but it is uncertain whether its effort will be a success, in view of various new challenges facing the country.
