Asian ports snarled as El Niño fuels busy typhoon season

An unusually active typhoon season is disrupting shipping operations across Asia, with Shanghai particularly hard hit by snarled traffic and vessel delays.

In an advisory published Wednesday, A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S warned that a string of severe typhoons in recent weeks had caused congestion at some of the region’s biggest ports “resulting in a decrease in on-time vessel arrivals.”

The average waiting time at Chinese ports ticked up to 3.38 days per vessel, the longest this year so far, data from market intelligence firm Kpler showed.


Shanghai, the world’s busiest container port, saw barely one-fifth of container ships arrive on time in July, according to analysis by Singapore-based maritime advisory firm Sea-Intelligence.

Weather-related disruptions persisted into August, which saw 12 tropical cyclones form in the Northwest Pacific and the South China Sea, marking the highest number of such storms in a single month since 1961, according to the Hong Kong Observatory.

Frequent tropical cyclones last month disrupted coastal bulk shipping, briefly raising freight rates for iron ore, coal and grains, according to a bulletin last week from China’s Ministry of Transport.

Khalid Hashim, managing director of bulk carrier owner Precious Shipping Pcl, said his ships had encountered delays of 10 to 20 days when attempting to berth at Chinese ports. “Weather has been so bad on land, with typhoons hitting,” he said at an industry conference in Singapore on Thursday. “The most efficient place on Earth for dry-bulk discharges is facing congestion,” he added, referring to China.

A rapidly strengthening El Niño is fueling East Asia’s intense typhoon activity. The climate phenomenon tends to enhance the formation of powerful storms in the Northwest Pacific. UK-based commercial forecaster Tropical Storm Risk expects the current typhoon season to be one of the most intense on record.

El Niño also unleashes changes in the ocean and atmosphere that in turn cause tropical cyclones to form further east in the Pacific Ocean. That gives the storms more time to intensify over warm waters.

It also nudges them to curve toward Japan, South Korea and central China, affecting the major sea lanes that link Asia and North America, said Todd Lanouette, business manager for shipping at commercial forecaster StormGeo.

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