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Tropical Cyclone Phailin intensified rapidly in the Bay of Bengal on Thursday and is now headed for a landfall along the eastern coast of India. Estimated top sustained winds increased from 65 mph to 155 mph in just 24 hours, according to Dr. Jeff Masters of Weather Underground.
(MORE: India Prepares For Phailin)
(Note: A tropical cyclone is what we call a hurricane in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific Oceans.)
As of Saturday morning (U.S. time), Phailin was rated as the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, with maximum sustained winds around 150 mph. According to a NOAA weather satellite, Phailin's central pressure bottomed out to 910 mbar, allowing winds to reach 175 mph on Friday evening.
Phailin will landfall shortly along the coast of the state of Odisha or the far northeastern Andrha Pradesh state, northeast of the town of Visakhapatnam in India.
(INTERACTIVE MAP: Phailin's Projected Path)
This portion of the India coast where Phailin is headed will be threatened by several potentially deadly impacts including storm surge flooding, damaging winds and flooding rainfall.
The northeast Indian coast is extremely prone to storm surge flooding, which makes this particular impact a huge concern for low-lying areas. According to NDTV.com, as many as 12 million people are likely to be affected by Cyclone Phailin. (Note: The article references "1.2 crore people." The word "crore" is a South Asian term which equates to a quantity of 10 million.)
Many of the world's deadliest tropical cyclones have come from the Bay of Bengal because of the region's extreme vulnerability to storm surge flooding. This includes portions of northeast India, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
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