Hurricane? Cyclone? Typhoon? Here’s the difference

Typhoon Kalmaegi has killed at least 114 people in the Philippines and left even more people missing as it moved on to slam Vietnam. A second typhoon, Fong-Wong, is forecast to hit the Philippines around Sunday and strengthen to a major storm by that time. Hearing these major storms called hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons may be confusing. But they’re all actually the same — officially, tropical cyclones. They just get different names in different parts of the world. Hurricane is used in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and central and northeast Pacific. In the northwest Pacific, they’re typhoons. And in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, they’re cyclones. These storms qualify once they muscle up to 74 mph (119 kph) or more.

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