About This Special Issue [Meteorology

Abstract

We are pleased to publish for 2023 this Special Issue on Meteorological Research in the Philippines. Meteorology is a branch of the atmospheric sciences that focuses on the challenging task of reliable weather forecasting. Long-term predictions are extremely difficult to make at high accuracy because the weather is a chaotic physical system that is quite sensitive to initial conditions. Small changes in the initial values that are caused by ambient noise or imprecise measurements can lead to significantly different future dynamical behavior. The Philippines (2020 population: 109,035,343) is prone to extreme weather events. Between 1946 and 2022, an average of 37 ± 8 tropical cyclones (TCs) were formed yearly in the Western North Pacific Basin, with 23 ± 5 of them entering the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR) and 10 ± 4 eventually making landfall in the Philippine archipelago. TCs can be categorized into five: super typhoons (max sustained wind speed > 185 kph), typhoons (118–184 kph), severe tropical storms (89–117 kph), tropical storms (62–88 kph), and tropical depressions (< 62 kph). The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship database (1950s–2010s) reveals that typhoons (at 80.85 ± 33.95 per decade) were the most numerous— followed by tropical depressions (78.57 ± 38.82), super typhoons (60.2 ± 31.14), tropical storms (56.6 ± 26.34), and severe tropical depressions (52.28 ± 23.8).