1964 Pacific typhoon season

The busiest typhoon year on record

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued 730 warnings in 1964 on 26 typhoons, 14 tropical storms and 5 depressions, and spent 153 days in warning status. The 26 typhoons broke the record of 24 set in 1962. The site's archive also counts 26 typhoons, but 38 tropical storms rather than 40, because it counts storms by best-track one-minute winds during the tropical stage and merges Typhoon Louise with the system the JTWC named Marge into a single record. Other season lists give 39 storms, the most in any year in any basin.

The South China Sea stood out. The JTWC counted 10 typhoons passing west of the Philippines and south of 18.5°N, against an average of 3.2 from 1959 to 1963. A weak La Niña developed from mid-1964, and a strong subtropical ridge in September and October that kept most storms on westward paths; only Wilda curved into the westerlies in September. The archive puts the season's accumulated cyclone energy at 398.8.

Of the 26 typhoons, the JTWC found that 15 dissipated over land, 5 over water, 2 were absorbed by other typhoons and only 4 became extratropical. It also puzzled over storms such as Alice, Elsie and Cora, which reconnaissance saw as full typhoons and then as weak lows within a few hours, with no known way to forecast the collapse. It was the first full season for the WB-47 reconnaissance jets of the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, and the Nimbus satellites first detected several of the year's storms.

Winnie in Manila and a record July

Typhoon Tess formed in mid-May and became the first typhoon on 19 May. Typhoon Viola made landfall west of Hong Kong on 28 May just under typhoon strength, and its rain ended a drought of more than two years there. Typhoon Winnie then crossed southern Luzon on 29 June with its eye passing over Manila. It was Luzon's worst typhoon since 1882; USAID counted 56 deaths, press reports gave up to 120, and about 500,000 people were left homeless.

July 1964 brought more tropical cyclones than any earlier July. Typhoon Cora peaked at 140 kt in the archive on 8 July, then weakened sharply and crossed southeastern Luzon as a depression. Typhoon Betty reached 110 kt south of Shanghai, and Typhoon Flossie passed near Shanghai before drowning 12 fishermen off Korea, where at least 17 people died. Typhoon Helen peaked at 130 kt near Iwo Jima and crossed southern Kyushu.

Ida, Kathy and a textbook Fujiwhara pair

Typhoon Ida peaked at 135 kt on 6 August and struck Luzon and then Hong Kong, where gusts reached 220 km/h and 3 people were killed by flying debris. The Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance counted 11 deaths in Luzon, with newswire tolls up to 79.

Typhoon Kathy was the largest and longest-lived typhoon of the year, with warnings over 13.5 days, and it made a smaller loop inside a larger one south of Japan. Between 15 and 18 August it circled with Typhoon Marie in what the JTWC called a classic Fujiwhara interaction, absorbing Marie early on 19 August. A single Navy VW-1 aircraft set a record that week by fixing both storms on one flight. Kathy came ashore in Kagoshima Prefecture on 23 August with winds of about 130 km/h, well below its 115 kt peak, and landslides and floods killed at least 13 people.

Ruby, Sally and Wilda in September

Typhoon Ruby peaked at 120 kt in the archive on 5 September and passed close to Hong Kong, where the Royal Observatory raised signal No. 10 for nearly four hours. A gust of 268 km/h hit Tate's Cairn. Ruby killed 38 people in Hong Kong, more than 20 in Macau and over 700 in Guangdong, some 300 of them when a school dormitory collapsed.

Typhoon Sally crossed southern Guam on 5 September with winds of about 155 km/h and then reached 170 kt and 895 hPa on 7 September, the season's highest winds and lowest pressure in the archive. It had weakened to about 155 km/h again when it came ashore east of Hong Kong on 10 September. Landslides there killed nine people, and Sally's remnants brought floods around Seoul that killed at least 211 people and displaced 36,665.

Typhoon Wilda peaked at 150 kt on 21 September and reached Cape Sata in Kagoshima with a central pressure of 940 hPa, among the strongest landfalls in Japan by pressure. Its winds three hours before landfall were about 185 km/h. Wilda crossed Shikoku and southern Honshu, killing 47 people, injuring 530 and destroying more than 70,000 homes across Japan.

Dot in Hong Kong, then floods in Vietnam

Typhoon Dot crossed northern Luzon and became the fifth typhoon of the year to hit Hong Kong, the second to bring signal No. 10. Landslides caused most of the 26 deaths in the official Hong Kong count, with 10 people missing. No year before 1964 had brought more than two typhoons to Hong Kong, and that the observatory kept warning signals up for 570 hours across ten storms.

In November three storms struck Vietnam within twelve days. Typhoon Iris and Typhoon Joan, both weak typhoons in the archive, brought the worst floods in six decades to central South Vietnam. The combined effects of Iris and Joan killed as many as 7,000 people, damaged about 90 percent of structures in three provinces and left nearly a million people homeless. Typhoon Kate then came ashore in South Vietnam on 17 November.

Louise and Opal close a violent year

Typhoon Louise passed 22 km south of Angaur in Palau, destroying 97 percent of structures on Peleliu, then peaked at 165 kt on 18 November near 7°N, an unusually low latitude for a storm that strong. It struck Surigao del Sur on 19 November with winds of about 260 km/h. It killed at least 576 people in the Philippines, with the Philippine Red Cross recording 631, including 312 in Surigao City. The JTWC and JMA ended Louise soon after landfall, while China's agency tracked it on across Luzon as Marge, and the archive keeps the two as one record.

Typhoon Opal passed between Yap and Palau and reached 170 kt on 12 December, matching Sally's winds. The JTWC reported that Opal had the largest circulation of the year, with a radius of 650 miles. It weakened before landfall on central Luzon on 14 December at about 140 km/h. In the Philippines Manila's airport closed and a landslide killed two people in Virac.