Astro-meteorology of typhoon Haiyan in Philippines

While the Atlantic Is Quiet, a Historic Typhoon Bears Down on the Western Pacific.

The tropical storm gathering strength in the western Pacific might be the most powerful on record. And the Philippines will pay the price. Super typhoon Haiyan, likely the strongest storm to form on the planet this year, is heading toward a Friday morning landfall in the Philippines, posing an extremely serious threat to the central part of the archipelago.

The quarterly ingress of the Sun into cardinal signs Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn are considered amongst the most important indicators for understanding weather patterns. Shown above is the chart for the sidereal Libra ingress at Manila. As regular readers are aware mundane charts acquire prominence when there are planets on the angles. Here we find Jupiter [19cn] conjunct the star Castor [20cn] on the descendant. The Twins Castor and Pollux have a historical reputation for storms at sea. Diana Rosenberg records “storms (extreme barometric lows)” against these stars and gives the following examples.

This was Uranus at  a 440 CE Solar Eclipse: the city of Ys in Brittany was “submerged in great flood” and “the sea submerged great  parts of Wales, most cattle drowned”; there was a July 1281 New Moon here at Kublai Khan’s second attempt  to invade Japan: a vast Armada of 4400 ships and 142,000 Mongol, Chinese and Korean troops set out in July; in Aug a typhoon struch destroying about 4000 ships and more than 100,000 troops; this was the Node at a July 1591 SolEcl, the year four hurricanes in one month sank more than 100 ships in the Western Hemisphere;  Mars at the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 : the barometer fell to 27.49 in – a US record up to that time: the city was inundated, about 8000 killed, “one of the worst natural disasters to hit the North American continent,” the Node in 1889 when a typhoon wrecked the ships of Germany and the US that were about to go to war; other events with placements here include the 1935 Category 5 Labor Day Hurricane that hit the Florida Keys: the barometer fell to 26.35 in, the lowest ever observed in the US: winds were estimated at 150 – 200 mph (all wind instruments were destroyed), it was labelled – “the most intense and tightly knit storm ever to hit Florida”; the terrible Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 (barometer 27.43 in; 5^th lowest in US history) that killed 5000 in the US and Caribbean; a massive cyclone with 145 mph wind speed that hit Bangladesh in 1911, killing about 139,000 people and half a million animals and many more.

So what has activated the ingress chart right now? We don’t need to look far. Jupiter has just stationed retrograde on 7 Nov. at 5:03 UT triggering its radix position  conjunct Castor on the descendant of the ingress chart. Also a  chart drawn  for Jupiter station brings Neptune [2pi35] to the Ascendant.  Neptune as god of the sea and his association with storms is well known.

In astro-meteorology,  lunation charts and the four phases of the moon each month - new, first quarter, full, and last quarter are looked at for weekly trends. The first quarter moon chart (10 Nov.) for Manila is shown above. Notice that the moon [18aq] and the MC [20sag40] form a yod with Jupiter [20cn30] – once again highlighting Jupiter and the star Castor which as we saw above is linked to violent storms.