Typhoon Saudel made its third landfall on the coast of Fujian province on Thursday morning, bringing torrential rain and widespread flooding to China’s southeast (Dawn; Xinhua; People’s Daily).
It came ashore at Zhangpu County at around 6.30am, with maximum sustained winds of 23 metres per second near the centre. Saudel had already made landfall twice on the Zhejiang coast on 28 August.
The impact
– more than 83,000 residents evacuated in Fujian by 7am Thursday – hundreds of thousands relocated across Zhejiang and neighbouring provinces since late August – a three-storey brick building collapsed in Jinxi village, a tea-growing community – schools closed and public transport suspended across coastal areas – vehicles submerged, structural damage in urban and rural districts
Guangdong was also affected. In Fuding, a tea-growing city, firefighters waded through waist-deep floodwater carrying elderly residents to safety.
The frequency is the story
Saudel is the seventh typhoon to strike China this year, and the 18th named typhoon of the 2026 season — two different counts that are easy to conflate. It is the third to hit Yuhuan city in eastern Zhejiang within two months — a concentration China’s Meteorological Administration described as “extremely rare”.
A typhoon researcher quoted in the reporting offered the mechanism: “stronger typhoons form towards the east and they travel long distances and get much stronger when they reach land.”
The pattern being described
That last sentence is doing more work than it appears to. Storms forming further east have more open ocean to cross, and warmer sea surface temperatures along that track mean they arrive at the coast carrying more energy rather than less — the reverse of the historical expectation that distance weakens a system.
The wider week in weather
The World Meteorological Organization warned yesterday that El Niño will intensify into a very strong event and may become the strongest since monitoring began, with a near-certain likelihood of persisting through February and effects running into 2027.
El Niño years typically suppress Atlantic hurricane activity while shifting Pacific storm behaviour. A season already at seven Chinese landfalls, with the strongest El Niño on record possibly still ahead of it, is the combination to watch.
[Image: a rescue worker holds a child while evacuating residents by boat amid flooding from Typhoon Saudel in Minhou county, Fuzhou, Fujian province, on 3 September. Reuters, via Dawn.]
[Image: Reuters via Dawn]
