The Hong Kong Observatory on Monday issued an alert for typhoon Merbok, which is expected to hit Hong Kong special administrative region during the night.
With Merbok approaching Hong Kong, the weather in the region became unstable with a mix of strong winds and rainstorms. Some of the schools in Hong Kong have suspended classes from Monday morning, while red flags were raised along seaside warning local residents to stay away from the sea.
For security purpose, some of the flights at the Hong Kong airport and ferries were cancelled due to the severe weather condition. Meanwhile, MTR and other public transport systems have intensified their services to ensure locals to return home safely.
Song Man-kuen, a senior scientific officer with the Hong Kong Observatory, said that Merbok is the kind of tropical storm at a lower grade compared with past storms that battered the city before.
“Its (Merbok’s) wind doesn’t count as a strong one within the system. You can see through radar images the range of its strong gale is quite small and is centered at the eastern eye of the wind. If Hong Kong is impacted by the strong gale, Merbok will have to be quite close to the Pearl River estuary,” Song explained.
According to a statement from the National Meteorological Center (NMC), the eye of Merbok, this year’s second typhoon, was above the South China Sea some 295 kilometres to the south of Shenzhen, south China’s Guangdong Province, packing winds of up to 20 meters per second on Monday morning.
The NMC also forecast that Merbok would move northwestward at a speed of 20 km per hour toward Guangdong and make landfall on the coast between Guangdong’s Zhuhai and Shantou cities on Monday night.
