Typhoon Dolphin, the most powerful tropical cyclone to hit China this year, made landfall near Yuhuan in eastern Zhejiang province at around 5:30 pm local time on Sunday, before making a second landfall near Wenzhou about an hour later, meteorological authorities said. The storm came ashore with sustained winds of roughly 151 km/h, equivalent to a Category 1 hurricane, prompting China’s National Meteorological Centre to issue a red alert, the highest level in the country’s typhoon warning system.
More than a million people were evacuated across the affected region. Wenzhou alone relocated over 900,000 residents and opened more than 1,000 emergency shelters, while Shanghai evacuated roughly 30,000 people and cancelled around 1,400 flights. Authorities warned that torrential rain through Wednesday could trigger severe flooding, landslides and urban waterlogging across Zhejiang, Shanghai, Fujian, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan and Shandong, with parts of central-eastern Zhejiang expected to see up to 500 mm of rainfall. Forecasters said the storm’s remnant vortex would continue pushing inland and weaken only gradually, prolonging the flood risk even after landfall.
While Typhoon Dolphin will have no direct impact on India, meteorologists say its atmospheric influence extends well beyond China’s coastline. The storm’s vast circulation is drawing moisture away from the Bay of Bengal, effectively starving the region of the humidity needed to form a low-pressure system — the kind of system that typically feeds active monsoon spells over central and eastern India. As a result, even as Dolphin floods Chinese cities, it is indirectly contributing to a comparatively drier, weaker phase of India’s monsoon during the period the storm remains active, illustrating how tropical weather systems thousands of kilometres apart can be atmospherically linked.