Tropical Storm Khunan blew past Japan today, this was not a powerful typhoon as we saw with Guchol yet it still left many water soaked as portions of southern Kagoshima Prefecture reported up to 117mm of max rainfall in the past 24hrs. Winds though only have peaked near the center of storm at gust up to 45kts while farther to the south west in Okinawa the US Military base there (Kadena) recorded winds up to 17G23kts, this is far shy of damaging winds. Thus this information leaves us to reason that the most threatening aspect of this storm has been and will continue to be the rainfall.
By Wednesday evening Khunan should make landfall along Koreas west coast likely just south of Seoul. By this time cool sea surface temperatures will weaken it although the rainfall will still flow onshore with the storm system. This comes as welcomed news for the most part as much of korea has been under a severe drought deemed one of the worst in 100 years. On the flip side of that coin heavy rainfall may not soak in to the ground and run-off quickly triggering the threat of flash flooding.
The video below goes in to more detail on this storm and more information.
Farther North in Mainland Japan oppressive heat has left one dead and many more have suffered heat stroke as an area of high pressure to the East of Honshu (West Pac High) is pumping warm air out of the tropics inland. This in return has brought one of the warmest days in Tokyo thus far this year. What makes this dangerous is that all but one of the Nuclear power plants in Japan are shut off. As people start to turn on there AC units power consumption will go up and already has by 90% in the last several days. This may cause the threat of brown outs or even blackouts across Japan, leading to the possibility of dangerous conditions as heat conditions remain.
The Japanese government strongly recommends everyone to closely monitor there power supply.
Farther south outflow from Khanun has spawned a new area in the tropics now being deemed invest 92W, a few of the models are picking up on this developing and moving north possibly effecting Taiwan or Japan by next week. We will closely watch this area as well in the coming days.
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