At least eight people have died after Super Typhoon Fung-wong (known as Super Typhoon Uwan inn the Philippines) swept across Luzon Island, the Philippines, on Saturday 8-Sunday 9 November 2025. This happened despite 1.4 million people being evacuated from areas deemed to be at risk from the storm. Three children are reported to have been killed in a landslide in Nueva Vizcaya Province, with another four being injured. Another landslide in the town of Lubuagan in Kalinga Province is known to have killed two people, with a further two missing, and another landslide killed an elderly person in Barlig, Mountain Provice. At least one person was killed in a flash flood in Pandan, Catanduanes Province. A woman is reported to have died in a house collapse on the island of Samar.
Tropical storms are caused by the warming effect of the Sun over tropical seas. As the air warms it expands, causing a drop in air pressure, and rises, causing air from outside the area to rush in to replace it. If this happens over a sufficiently wide area, then the inrushing winds will be affected by centrifugal forces caused by the Earth's rotation (the Coriolis effect). This means that winds will be deflected clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the southern hemisphere, eventually creating a large, rotating Tropical Storm. They have different names in different parts of the world, with those in the northwest Pacific being referred to as typhoons.
Despite the obvious danger of winds of this speed, which can physically blow people, and other large objects, away as well as damaging buildings and uprooting trees, the real danger from these storms comes from the flooding they bring. Each drop millibar drop in air-pressure leads to an approximate 1 cm rise in sea level, with big tropical storms capable of causing a storm surge of several meters. This is always accompanied by heavy rainfall, since warm air over the ocean leads to evaporation of sea water, which is then carried with the storm. These combined often lead to catastrophic flooding in areas hit by tropical storms.
Fung-wong was first observed as a convection current over the Central Pacific (about 560 km to the northeast of the island of Chuuk in Micronesia) on 3 November 2025. The current formed in an area with low vertical wind-shear and a sea surface temperature of 29–30°C (ideal conditions for tropical storm formation), and rapidly intensified, being officially upgraded to a tropical depression later that day. The system drifted to the east and gained in strength over the next 48 hours, being upgraded to a tropical storm and officially named Fung-wong by the Japanese Meteorological Agency on 5 November.
By 6 November if was clear that the storm was heading towards the Philippines, causing the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration to give it their own name, Uwan (the Philippines names storms according to its own system, and does not recognise names given by the Japan Meteorological Association, despite the fact that that body almost always detects Pacific storms first, and the use of names awarded by the Japanese by all other countries in the region). This is only the second time they have ever done this before a storm entered their waters, a sign of how concerned they were by the storm. On the same day the storm was upgraded to a Typhoon.
On 8 November, Fung-woon began to intensify rapidly being upgraded to a Super Typhoon 13.10 hours before making landfall in the Philippines. When it did it brought with it sustained winds of over 185 km per hour, and gusts of up to 230 km per hour, over a storm front about 1800 km wide. This was accompanied by very heavy rainfall, with many areas receiving more rain in 24 hours than they usually do in the entire month of November.
The high rainfall was particularly problematic, as Super Typhoon Fung-wong passed over the Philippines only four days after Typhoon Kalmaegi, itself a major storm which brought with it major flooding. This meant that rivers and lakes were already at or over their safe capacity, and soil in many areas was already waterlogged, when the storm hit, making the flooding caused by the new storm particularly intense.
As well as leading to larger and more frequent storms, warmer seas can enable them to change course rapidly, making it harder to predict where and when they will make landfall. This means that rising global temperatures, and the subsequent rise in sea temperatures, are both more and larger storms, but that tracking these storms is becoming much more problematic.
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