At the edge of a tempest.THEY USUALLY BEGIN in the summer and strike periodically until well into autumn, riding the warm southern waters of the Kuroshio (Black Current), the great river-in-the-sea that flows northeastward along Japan's Pacific coast. Together with the tsuyu, Japan's monsoon rains, they are the most obvious evidence of the great seasonal metronome metronome (mĕ`trənōm'), in music, originally pyramid-shaped clockwork mechanism to indicate the exact tempo in which a work is to be performed. It has a double pendulum whose pace can be altered by sliding the upper weight up or down. . [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Japanese call them taifu, which is written with the ideographs for 'pedestal' or 'calyx' ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, a few symbols, and control characters. Originally designed for teletype operations, it has found wide application in computers. ]) and 'wind' ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). From it derives the English 'typhoon.' Typhoons are tropical cyclones, storm systems that commonly evolve in near-equatorial latitudes. The term 'typhoon' refers to such cyclones occurring in the Pacific west of the International Date Line and north of the Equator. Between the International Date Line and the Greenwich Meridian, the term 'hurricane' (from the Arawak word urakan--'center of the wind') is used. The photograph is not of a typhoon typhoon: see hurricane. proper, but of the smaller thunderheads at the farthest edge of an advancing system. It was taken from the cockpit of an F-15D fighter returning to Okinawa's Kadena Air Base “Kadena” redirects here. For other uses, see Kadena (disambiguation). Kadena Air Base is a United States Air Force base located in the towns of Kadena and Chatan and the city of Okinawa, in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Kadena Air Base is the hub of U.S. . A typhoon was approaching, but it was still almost three days away. At 27,000 feet, our flight of four jets was surrounded with great colonnades Colonnades may refer to one of two things
adj. Illuminated by the sun. Adj. 1. sunlit - lighted by sunlight; "the sunlit slopes of the canyon"; "violet valleys and the sunstruck ridges"- Wallace Stegner sunstruck cloud--the sky's warm and humid spaces were filled with these vigorous thunderheads whose height and size could only hint at the huge mass of the storm to come. We flew between and around them, dwarfed by their towering magnificence. Each season sees between a half dozen and a dozen typhoons track through the main islands of the Japanese archipelago. The number that strike subtropical sub·trop·i·cal adj. Of, relating to, or being the geographic areas adjacent to the Tropics. subtropical Adjective of the region lying between the tropics and temperate lands Okinawa Prefecture can be twice that. There is often some flood and wind damage, and occasional loss of life; if the typhoon is a particularly powerful one, major damage can result. Large or small, they are freighted with precious rain that fills lakes and reservoirs. A year with few typhoons is a year of pinched water supplies. These great storms, with their howling winds and driving rains, are a fact of life in Japan. |
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