The typhoon made landfall on the coast of Hailing Island, Yanjiang City in Guangdong at about 17:00 local time (9:00 GMT) on Wednesday, according to Chinese state media. It crossed the mainland with sustained winds of 144km/h and higher gusts. Wind speeds are expected to gradually weaken as the storm moves westwards over land but rain will be torrential and slow-moving across the region for several more days. 

The southern Chinese cities of Zhuhai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou - all located in Guangdong - were braced for seawater intrusion from about midday local time. In Zhuhai, police patrolled the streets with sirens and megaphones, telling people to stay at home. Red alerts for landslides were also issued in the mountainous regions of Guangdong province. Away from the Chinese mainland, authorities in Taiwan are still dealing with the destruction caused by Ragasa, which officials have described as being "far worse than anticipated". Premier Cho Jung-Tai has demanded an inquiry into how evacuations were carried out after at least 17 people died after a barrier lake, formed by a landslide in July, burst its banks in Hualien county, causing severe flooding in the town of Guangfu. Others remain missing, the fire department said."We must investigate why evacuation orders were not carried out in the areas we had asked for, which led to such a tragedy," Cho told reporters. "This is not about assigning blame, but about uncovering the truth."

Earlier on Wednesday, the village chief of the township of Dama in Taiwan, home to about 1,000 people, said the entire village had been flooded and many people were still stranded as a result of the Matai'an Creek barrier lake burst Taiwan lake as strongest storm barrels towards China,  "It's chaotic now," Wang Tse-an told Reuters news agency. "There is mud and rocks everywhere. Some flooding has subsided but some remains.".......read on     https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8edyey1llo

AND....Howling winds and sheets of rain inside Chinese city battered by Typhoon Ragasa CNN 24 September 2025 Briana Waxman  Helen Regan The sound of rush hour in Zhuhai on China's southern coast has been replaced by howling winds and sheets of rain. Branches from falling trees and what looked like pieces of metal from the edge of a building flew along empty roads on Wednesday as typhoon Ragasa bore down. Police vehicles have been patrolling the streets with megaphones, urging people to stay inside - but it is difficult to hear them above gusts of 100mph (160km/h) winds. Still, the thundering skies and a drenched Zhuhai are enough of a warning – apart from an occasional cyclist, determined to get to work, most people heeded the advice, bringing this city of almost three million people to a standstill.

The strongest storm the world has seen this year, Ragasa has been making its way across the South China Sea after battering the Philippines and Taiwan. At least 15 people have died in eastern Taiwan after a mountain lake burst its banks, officials have said. As the storm brushed past Hong Kong, steep waves crashed into land, inundating coastal areas, alongside powerful winds and rain, leaving more than 60 people injured. It made landfall in China this evening at17:00 local time (09:00 GMT). By then nearly two million people in densely populated Guangdong province, home to Zhuhai, had already been evacuated. Officials have also issued a red alert for high tides and coastal surges.

As the eye of the storm barrelled close to the mainland, the rain lashed the city's tall buildings. The wind, already strong, hit harder in waves and blasts, which made standing upright almost impossible. Even watching from inside, windows in our new hotel creaked under the strain.......read on  https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/asia/super-typhoon-ragasa-philippines-hong-kong-intl-hnk

Warmer temperatures lead to drying.....Global warming increases the risk of drought in several ways. 

Yale Climate Connections Tiffany Means May11 2025 For one, water generally evaporates more quickly at higher temperatures. For that reason, hotter weather can result in drier soils. As high air temperatures sap liquid water from soils and plant leaves, transforming it into atmospheric water vapor via a process called transpiration, ground-level drying will increase in some regions. (Ironically, this additional atmospheric moisture triggers heavier downpours in other regions, which explains why the overall trend in the U.S. has been toward wetter conditions.) Higher air temperatures not only encourage drought conditions to build but also intensify them. What might have otherwise been a mild or moderate drought in a cooler world will become, in a warmer world, more severe as a result of increased evaporation. 

Warming also diminishes snowfall, an essential water resource for the estimated 1.9 billion residents of the Northern Hemisphere who depend on snowpacks, or snow reservoirs that store water during the cooler months and release it when it’s needed in the warmer, drier months. Rising temperatures increase the fraction of winter precipitation that falls as rain rather than snow and also shorten the cold season, so there’s less time for snow to even occur. Such was the case in 2015, the fourth-warmest year in the contiguous U.S., when a snow drought reduced the April snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range to a mere 5% of its historical average water content — its lowest snowpack in 500 years. Seasonal melting of snowpacks can be thrown off-kilter, too. As average temperatures warm above freezing earlier in the spring, snowmelt occurs sooner and faster than usual. And rapid melting results in a shorter period during which soils and plants are kept moist. Another way a warmer atmosphere can disrupt precipitation is by shifting storm tracks. Ordinarily, low-pressure systems known as extratropical cyclones form between 30 and 60 degrees latitude north and south of the equator. But as the climate warms globally, storms are shifting toward the poles. This means that weather features such as atmospheric rivers, which supply as much as 50% of annual precipitation to states in the Western U.S., could cease to pass over regions where their moisture is much-needed.

Is global warming causing more droughts? ........Scientists see a clear correlation between droughts and global warming. But a correlation between two events doesn’t always mean one caused the other. For example, ice cream sales often increase around the time that baseball game attendance rises, but that does not mean that eating ice cream causes people to attend baseball games. Nor does it mean that attending baseball games causes people to eat ice cream. It can be tricky to attribute an increase in droughts to global warming because droughts are variable. In other words, they can occur every year or every few years, last for years or decades, and cause varying levels of dryness. That makes it difficult to distinguish random events from those possibly shaped by human-caused warming. However, the more drought dovetails with trends of increasing temperature, decreasing precipitation, and with computer model projections, the more confident scientists are in pointing to climate change.

In a 2020 study in the journal Science, for example, researchers observed how human-caused climate change is contributing to the 21st-century megadrought in the Western U.S. and northern Mexico by evaluating trends in modeled temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation data between 1901 and 2018. According to the study’s findings, human-caused warming accounts for 46% of this drought’s severity. What about the rest of the world? Scientists have been cautious about linking human activities to global drought patterns, largely because drought hasn’t occurred as uniformly worldwide as it has across individual regions. That said, building evidence supports the climate change-drought connection on a global scale. According to an August 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists have high confidence that for every half degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) the atmosphere warms, noticeable increases will occur in some regions in the intensity and frequency of droughts that harm agriculture and ecosystems. Similarly, the report notes that extreme agricultural and ecological drought events that used to occur once every 10 years are now 1.7 times more likely than they were from 1850 to 1900, before humans heavily influenced the climate.......read on        https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/05/climate-change-and-droughts-whats-the-connection/   

 How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods. BBC 14 November 2024 Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard Parts of Spain have again been hit by torrential rain, just two weeks after the flooding that killed more than 220 people. Like other extreme weather events, episodes of heavy rainfall are becoming more common and more intense in many places around the world, driven by climate change.

Here are four ways that rising temperatures are affecting weather extremes......

1. More extreme rain.....For every 1C rise in average temperature, the atmosphere can hold up to around 7% more moisture. With more moisture available, rainfall can become heavier. Scientists use computer models to simulate how individual extreme weather events unfold in two scenarios..... today's world with around 1.2C of human-caused warming.......a hypothetical world without human influence on the climate.. That way, they can estimate how much a particular storm, heatwave or drought was affected by climate change. Between October 2023 and March 2024, the UK experienced the second-wettest such period on record. This level of rainfall was made at least four times as likely by human-caused warming, according to scientists at the World Weather Attribution group (WWA). In September 2024, deadly floods hit much of central Europe, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy. The intensity of the rainfall over four days in mid-September was made twice as likely by climate change, the WWA says. Climate change is also likely to have played a part in the heavy rainfall seen in Spain in late October and early November. Scientists point to the influence of rising temperatures, although a full study is needed to evaluate exactly how much of an influence climate change had compared with naturally fluctuating weather patterns. Globally, heavy rainfall events have become more frequent and intense over most land regions due to human activity, according to the UN's climate body, the IPCC. It says this pattern will continue with further warming. 

2. Hotter, longer heatwaves.....Even a small increase in average temperatures makes a big difference to heat extremes. As the range of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, hotter days become more likely and more intense. In April 2024, temperatures in Mali rose above 48C during an extreme heatwave across the Sahel region of Africa which was linked to increased hospitalisations and deaths. This level of heat would not have been possible without human-caused climate change, according to the WWA. Such temperature spikes will become more common in many places as the world continues to warm.

In the UK, temperatures topped 40C for the first time on record in July 2022, causing extensive disruption. This would have been extremely unlikely without climate change, the WWA said. Heatwaves can happen as a result of heat domes, which are created when an area of high pressure stays over the same area for days or weeks, trapping hot air underneath. 

3. Longer droughts.....Linking climate change with specific individual droughts can be difficult, because there are lots of different factors that affect the availability of water. Natural weather systems, for example, can play a key role, as was the case with drought in southern Africa in early 2024.....read on   https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58073295

How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods.BBC News14 November 2024 Mark Poynting and Esme Stallard Parts of Spain have again been hit by torrential rain, just two weeks after the flooding that killed more than 220 people. Like other extreme weather events, episodes of heavy rainfall are becoming more common and more intense in many places around the world, driven by climate change. Here are four ways that rising temperatures are affecting weather extremes.