Abstract. A typhoon struck the Pearl River Estuary in September 1874 (“Typhoon 1874”), causing extensive damage and claiming thousands of lives
in the region during its passage. Like many other historical typhoons, the
deadliest impact of the typhoon was its associated storm surge. In this
paper, a possible track of the typhoon was reconstructed through an analysis of the
historical qualitative and quantitative weather observations in the
Philippines, the northern part of the South China Sea, Hong Kong, Macao, and
Guangdong recorded in various historical documents. The magnitudes of the
associated storm surges and storm tides in Hong Kong and Macao were also
quantitatively estimated using storm surge model and analogue astronomical
tides based on the reconstructed track. The results indicated that the
typhoon could have crossed the Luzon Strait from the western North Pacific
and moved across the northeastern part of the South China Sea to strike the
Pearl River Estuary more or less as a super typhoon in the early morning on
23 September 1874. The typhoon passed about 60 km south–southwest of Hong
Kong and made landfall in Macao, bringing maximum storm tides of around 4.9 m above the Hong Kong Chart Datum (http://www.geodetic.gov.hk/smo/gsi/Data/pdf/explanatorynotes.pdf, last access: 3 January 2020) at the
Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong and around 5.4 m above the Macao Chart
Datum (https://mosref.dscc.gov.mo/Help/ref/Macaucoord_2009_web_EN_v201702.pdf, last access: 3 January 2020) at
Porto Interior (inner harbour) in Macao. Both the maximum storm tide (4.88 m
above the Hong Kong Chart Datum) and maximum storm surge (2.83 m) brought by
Typhoon 1874 at the Victoria Harbour estimated in this study are higher than
all the existing records since the establishment of the Hong Kong
Observatory in 1883, including the recent records set by super typhoon
Mangkhut on 16 September 2018.
Heavy metals in water, soils and plants in riparian wetlands in the Pearl River Estuary, South China
