James Reynolds, who chases typhoons for a living and documents them on video, is used to challenging and dangerous circumstances. But for Reynolds, the biggest issue in tracking Typhoon Shanshan is its unpredictability.
He first drove to Osaka earlier this week to prepare for a then-forecast landfall in the Shikoku region. But after two days of waiting, he made a U-turn to Tokyo and, instead, flew to Kagoshima Prefecture on Wednesday morning, anticipating a landfall there on Thursday.
“Shanshan has been one of the bigger outliers among all the storms I’ve tracked in terms of the continued changes in forecast and how the computer weather models are handling it,” Reynolds wrote in an email.