Typhoon Soudelor continues to head directly for the island nation of Taiwan, and began showing signs of reintensification on Thursday morning. Although there is considerable uncertainty about the storm's intensity on Friday morning ET, or Friday evening local time, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) is forecasting that the storm may come ashore with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour, or 115 knots.
This would make it the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane, capable of inflicting widespread damage from high winds, storm surge flooding and massive amounts of rainfall in Taiwan. The country's mountainous terrain can wring out copious amounts of rainfall from landfalling storms by forcing the warm, moist air to rise, cool and condense into rain clouds, through a process known as orographic lift.
While Taiwan's homes and businesses are built to withstand high winds -- the area sees an average of between 3 and 4 typhoons per year -- heavy rainfall can lead to deadly flooding and mudslides. Typhoon Soudelor is expected to dump one to two feet of rain on parts of Taiwan, before the storm weakens and makes a second landfall near Quanzhou on Saturday.
Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau has issued extremely heavy rain advisories and sea and land typhoon warnings for much of the country.
The storm is still packing a significant punch even though it has weakened from its extraordinary intensity seen on Monday, when it ranked as the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth in 2015, with sustained winds of 180 miles per hour, or 155 knots, and higher gusts. The storm was the sixth Category 5 tropical cyclone on Earth so far this year, which is about two such storms more than average.
Typically, El Niño events, such as one going on now in the Pacific Ocean, tend to spawn more frequent typhoons and hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean, including an uptick in the number of Category 5 storms.
The JTWC is predicting "a sharp re-intensification" of the storm on Thursday into Friday as the storm passes over mild ocean waters and traverses an area of low wind shear, which can inhibit tropical cyclone intensity. The storm has been undergoing what is known as an eye wall replacement cycle, which can temporarily stifle storm intensity before allowing such weather systems to re-intensify rapidly.
The view out my window this morning.#Typhoon #Soudelor still looking ominous from @Space_Station. #YearInSpace, pic.twitter.com/nK8WtuQnrJ— Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly) August 6, 2015
"There is a great deal of uncertainty in timing an eye wall replacement cycle," the JTWC said in an online forecast discussion. New generations of computer models, such as the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting model, or HWRF, have a sufficiently high resolution to begin to capture such cycles.