Storm Noul hit southern Laos on Friday after passing through Vietnam, bringing heavy rain and flooding to many areas. In Xekong province, the main road in Ta-oy district was flooded on Friday, causing problems for traffic.

A local official said “Livestock was moved to higher ground after we received forecasts of the storm but the rain flooded rice fields and other cropland, and affected people’s property. We are currently assessing the extent of and the cost of the damage caused.”

The Xe-kaman 3 hydropower plant, which is located in Dakcheung district, Xekong province, began releasing water on Friday in order to regulate the water level in the reservoir, discharging 30-100 cubic metres per second.

The Meteorology and Hydrology Department, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, issued a weather alert on Friday to warn local authorities about the approaching storm so they could take steps to prevent flooding.

In Champassak province, water that collected after torrential rain flooded parts of Pakxe city when drains were unable to cope with the deluge.

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The National Hydro Meteorological Forecasting Center last night warned that Typhoon Tokage has entered the East Sea with constantly changing path jeopardizing boats at sea. It is the ninth storm entering the East Sea and affecting Vietnam this year and expected to move north-northwest and north-northeast later at the speed of 10-15 kilometers an hour. By this afternoon, Tokage will be centered 610 kilometers east of the Hoang Sa (Paracel) Islands. The wind power near the center of the storm reached level 10 moving 89-102 kilometers an hour. Within the next 24-48 hours, its direction will change to move west-northwest at 5-10 kilometers an hour towards the coast of the central region of Vietnam. The center of the typhoon will locate 470 kilometers east-northeast of the Paracel Islands with the fury degrading to level 9 traveling 75-88 kilometers an hour tomorrow afternoon.

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A storm gathering in the Bay of Bengal is now anticipated to unleash heavy rain on Myanmar, but the cyclone has turned northwest and is forecast to hit India and Bangladesh instead. The Department of Meteorology and Hydrology said on October 24 that the cyclone is no longer on track to make landfall in Myanmar. The red alert, indicating a storm is expected to cross the coastline within 12 hours, has been downgraded to yellow, meaning the storm has formed but is not directed toward Myanmar. While no longer in the path of the season’s first cyclone, thousands of residents in the delta are still expected to bear the brunt of the storm before it curves. Labutta and Thandwe townships are still in the rage of gusting winds up to 65 kilometres per hour. Flooding continues to be forecast as a major risk.

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Typhoon Haima churned toward southern China on October 21 after smashing into the northern Philippines with ferocious wind and rain, triggering flooding, landslides and power outages and killing seven people. China suspended rail services in several provinces on the mainland’s south, where the typhoon is expected to make landfall in the afternoon. In the city of Shenzhen, authorities ordered schools, markets and factories to close, halted public transportation and evacuated some areas. Hong Kong hunkered down as Haima lashed the financial hub with rain and wind gusts of up to 96 kilometers an hour. Schools and offices were shut and trading on the stock market suspended after the third most serious storm signal was hoisted, leaving an eerie calm in the streets of the normally bustling city. Nearly 700 flights to and from the city’s international airport were canceled or delayed. By late morning, the storm was about 130 kilometers east of the city.

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The industrial sector is bracing for floods over the next several weeks and is relying on major reservoirs and flood prevention measures to safeguard industrial parks. The Meteorological Department has warned that a low-pressure system will hit several regions of Thailand. “This weather pattern is expected to bring heavy rains and even torrential downpours to the northern, northeastern and western regions,” the department said in its weekly weather forecast. “These heavy rain during this week and over the next several weeks will cause floods and flash floods in the affected regions.” Heavy rains and flash floods from the north and the northeast are expected to push excessive water along major rivers to the central region of Thailand, which houses several Thai industrial estates.

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Human-caused climate change has made certain typhoons more frequent and severe. Tropical cyclones can cause devastating and lethal damage to East and Southeast Asian countries. But accurately tracking changes in the frequency and intensity of typhoons is challenging in part because the data on these storms hasn’t always been consistently kept, and in part because there’s simply a lot of variability in the number of storms that make landfall. In a recent issue of Nature Geoscience, new cluster and bias-corrected analyses of storm data show that the intensity and frequency of these dangerous storms have increased considerably. This increase is most likely due to oceanic warming related to climate change. The authors of this paper focused on typhoons that strike East Asia, which limits the analysis to the northwest Pacific Ocean. They used a regional cluster analysis to probe the storm data, grouping the cyclones according to the part of the ocean where they formed and their movement patterns. This clustered analysis allowed the researchers to organize the inconsistent data in a way that allowed them to make inferences despite data variability.

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The Meteorological Department issued a warning on September 13 to people in 34 provinces in the North, Northeast and East to brace for heavy rain and stay tuned for weather updates. As of early Wednesday, tropical storm “Rai” was over Laos and the Northeast on September 14. The storm was dissipating but dumping tonnes of rain throughout that region. The tropical depression — when a low pressure area is accompanied by thunderstorms — was moving west to northwest at 20kph when it reached Da Nang in the night of September 12 before moving toward the Northeast of Thailand in the evening of September 13. Heavy rain is likely to occur in many of the provinces in the North, Northeast and the Central Plains, extending as far as Sakon Nakhon, Nakhon Phanom, Nakhon Ratchasima, Chon Buri and Chiang Mai.

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