Last week, heavy rain lashed wide areas of Japan along the Pacific coast, flooding hundreds of houses and suspending railway and airline services for hours. The damage was in part due to the passing of Mawar, which started as a typhoon in the Caroline Islands in the western Pacific Ocean on May 20 and slammed Guam’s houses and structures, before turning into an extratropical cyclone south of Japan on June 3.
The country is hit with numerous typhoons every year, but they tend to land or approach the archipelago late in the summer, in August or September. Why did a violent typhoon come so close to Japan relatively early in the year, and how will this year’s typhoon season unfold?
Experts say that, while precise predictions over several months are impossible to make, more typhoons could be seen this year and some of them may hit Japan pretty hard.