Typhoon Champi is on course to bring heavy rain to much of Taiwan on October 23-24, though forecasters still cannot predict with any amount of certainty which way it will turn.
The island's Central Weather Administration (CWA) expects to post a sea warning for the storm as soon as the evening of October 21 or possibly the next morning, and a land warning has not been ruled out in the days ahead, Focus Taiwan has reported.
As it stands, and even with a predicted northern turn up towards Japan's Okinawa islands having been made in recent hours, the storm should drench central and northern Taiwan and the eastern counties of Yilan and Hualien, CWA forecaster Liu Pei-teng said.
Champi threatens to be one more blow in a disaster season that has already brought record rainfall to southern Taiwan, killed dozens of people in the Philippines and cut power to thousands of buildings in Okinawa.
As of the early hours of October 20 the typhoon is still more than 1,500km southeast of Taiwan and is slowly tracking west-northwest. CWA data had previously put its maximum sustained winds at 191 kph and its radius at 200 km.
While some models still have it making a direct hit on Taiwan's main island, others see it moving to the north into the East China Sea. Its path still hinges on the Pacific high-pressure system.
An early weakening of the high would likely see Champi swing north before it reaches Taiwan, while a stronger high could push it onto a more southerly path or through the Bashi Channel that separates Taiwan from the Philippines, Liu said. International models still diverge, and October 20 should show whether the storm turns north, Liu added.
In July, Typhoon Bavi was billed as a once-in-a-generation storm for Taiwan. It did less damage than feared but still injured at least 87 people, forced more than 14,000 from their homes and cut power to about 177,000 households.
The south of the country took the heaviest punishment in late August, when torrential rain carried in on south-westerly winds swamped the city of Kaohsiung. The port city logged 1,712 mm of rain in August, about four times its monthly average and a record for the month.
Taiwanese farms lost TWD77.2mn ($2.37mn) of crops, chiefly wax apples, guavas and papayas, Focus Taiwan reported on September 3, citing the city's agriculture bureau.
The flooding killed one person and injured at least 164, Bloomberg reported before days later Typhoon Saudel put northern shipping lanes on alert while its outer bands brought fresh downpours to Taiwan's Pingtung, Tainan and Kaohsiung.
In the Philippines, Bavi, known locally as Inday, and the monsoon rains it intensified killed at least 20 people in July, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). From early August a run of storms - Luis, Maymay, Neneng and Pilandok - fed a heavy south-west monsoon that by the end of the month had left 646 locations under water across seven regions.
By September 10 that sequence had killed a reported 44 people, affected 10.4mn and caused PHP8.3bn ($132mn) of damage to infrastructure and PHP4.38bn to crops, the NDRRMC said, with 188 cities and towns under a state of calamity. Manila, which scrapped locally funded flood-control spending for 2026 after a corruption scandal, has asked for PHP83.84bn ($1.33bn) for such projects in its 2027 draft budget.
On Okinawa in southern Japan, just to the northeast of Taiwan, residents were told to brace for Typhoon Mekkhala in June, and on August 7 Typhoon Dolphin raked the north of the main island, injuring five elderly people and leaving 14,000 buildings without power.