Powerful Typhoon Grazes the Philippines on Its Way to China

Typhoon Doksuri, a tropical cyclone moving through the Pacific Ocean with wind speeds equivalent to those of a Category 4 hurricane, grazed the northern Philippines on Wednesday morning and was expected to pass near Taiwan before making landfall in China later this week.

The storm was hovering on Wednesday morning near a group of small islands north of Luzon, the country’s largest and most populous island, the national meteorological service said in a bulletin. The agency had warned that flooding and rain-induced landslides were possible this week, and urged people in some low-lying areas to evacuate.

It was not immediately clear if the cyclone had caused any major damage.

Doksuri had a maximum sustained wind speed of 138 miles per hour early Wednesday morning, according to the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii. That would make it a Category 4 storm on the scale that is used to measure hurricanes in the Atlantic. Category 5 storms, the most intense, have maximum sustained winds of 157 m.p.h. or higher.

The storm was moving southwest at about 9 m.p.h. as of 8 a.m. Wednesday and could later make landfall on Luzon, the Philippine meteorological service said. It was expected make landfall on China’s southern coast, most likely in the vicinity of Fujian Province, on Friday morning.

In the Philippines, where the government has used a parallel typhoon naming system for decades, Doksuri is known as Egay.

A tropical cyclone is a storm, typically one with a diameter of a couple hundred miles, that begins over a tropical ocean and generates violent winds, torrential rain and high waves. The term “hurricane” applies to those that form in the North Atlantic, the northeastern Pacific, the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico; “typhoon” applies to ones that develop in the northwestern Pacific and affect Asia.

As Doksuri heads toward China this week, it is expected to drop several inches of rain in Taiwan and potentially hit the island’s southern tip, according to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau.

Heavy rain and high winds are also forecast for later this week in Hong Kong, the Chinese territory that sits off the mainland’s southern coast and west of both Taiwan and Fujian Province.

Orlando Mayorquin contributed reporting.