Shanghai cancels about 1,300 flights and Zhejiang halts port operations as Typhoon Dolphin approaches

Typhoon Dolphin made landfall near Yuhuan in eastern Zhejiang province at about 5:30 p.m. Sunday (0930 GMT), with maximum sustained winds of 42 metres per second (151 kilometres an hour) near its centre, matching the strength of a Category 1 hurricane, China's meteorological authorities said. Shanghai had cancelled close to 1,300 flights ahead of the storm, and the South China Morning Post reported that cancellations at Hongqiao and Pudong airports reached about 80 percent of Sunday's schedule as the storm closed in, after China's National Meteorological Centre had issued its highest storm warning level.

The maritime and evacuation response is the part that reaches global supply chains. Zhejiang raised its coastal typhoon alert to the top level, halted port operations and suspended 162 passenger ferry routes, and the Shanghai Maritime Safety Administration ordered vessels to seek shelter. More than a million people were moved to safety across eastern China, with the city of Wenzhou alone relocating more than 900,000 residents and opening more than 1,000 emergency shelters. Eastern Zhejiang could still receive more than 600 millimetres of rain through Monday. The affected coast contains Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan, two of the largest container ports in the world.

The storm's outer bands brought the opposite problem to Hong Kong, where the observatory recorded 36 degrees Celsius on Sunday afternoon, the hottest day of the year so far. Descending air on the outer edge of a typhoon compresses and warms, which is why a single storm can cause flooding in one city and heat stress in another 800 kilometres away.

Chinese forecasters described the system as unusual because it formed near the International Date Line and travelled the length of the Pacific before reaching Japan and then China.