SAIPAN – The National Weather Service in Guam has ruled out that Typhoon Soudelor brought in super typhoon or Category 5-strength winds when it hit Saipan last week, saying damage sustained by the island was more nsistent with a Category 3 typhoon.

However, the typhoon was unique for the intensity of its power despite being small in physical size.

Chip Guard, Warning Coordination Meteorologist of the NWS Forecast Office Guam, and Dr Mark Lander of the Water and Environmental Research Institute said damage on the island, as well as the pressure recorded, was consistent with a Category 3 – which has winds of up to 170 and gusts of 240kph.

Lander said they ruled out a super typhoon because there needed to be damage they weren’t able to see on the island.

Despite Saipan being badly hit, most of the damage was “architectural damage” rather than “structural damage”, they said. They also pointed out that the storm surge was “negligible.”

While some residents commented that what they experienced was similar to a tornado, the meteorologists say there was none of that with Soudelor.

“All the stripes and patches of damage just come with the terrain,” Lander said. “It’s not part of the typhoon doing that. It’s the wind interacting with the island.”

“The terrain can do a lot of different things to the winds. Anytime you have a slope terrain, the winds accelerate up and they accelerate down,” Guard said.

Guard described Soudelor as a “unique” typhoon.

“It was an incredibly small storm, very intense. It’s a storm we really have not seen go over populated areas,” Guard said.

He pointed out that most typhoons are 30 kilometres high and over 300 kilometres wide – but Soudelor was as wide as it was high—even less than 30 kilometres in height and in width.

“Our first shock was flying over the northern part of Tinian and not seeing a single piece of damage. The trees were just perfect. That shows you how incredibly small this storm was,” Guard said.

“We seldom see these kinds of storms and we kind of wondered what’s inside them because they’ve got an eye so small the satellite has trouble resolving it. We call it the pinhole eye,” he added.

Guard said they really “don’t know what’s inside” and “how these things behave.”

Asked about being wrong with their forecast, Guard said they were indeed “wrong.”

“We did forecast it wrong. It’s called a forecast. We don’t know the answer but we give you the best information that we have at the time,” Guard said.

“All the weather agencies have the same answer and it just happened to be the wrong answer with regards to how fast it was intensifying,” he added.

“The rate that it was intensifying was much faster than what we expected it to intensify. So really, when we realised how strong the winds were getting, it was really too late for you all to do anything except hunker down and wait until the worst of it passed.”

With their assessment data, the NWS will be making a report and will work with other people such as theoreticians in studying the typhoon.

“We’re going to have to work with some of our colleagues back in MIT and some of the universities to look at what can happen in a storm that has these characteristics. We’ve never seen one before,” Guard said.