Cyclone Phet hits Pakistan's coastline

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Cyclone Phet weakened Sunday after reaching two coastal districts of Pakistan's southern Sindh province, officials said. Heavy rains and winds lashed Karachi, the province's capital, killing at least four people as the cyclone swirled along Pakistan's coast after killing 15 people in Oman.

"The cyclone moved rapidly eastwards in last six hours and went away from Karachi's coast" after hitting Sindh's Thatta and Badin coastal districts, Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, of Pakistan's meteorological department, told AFP. "The cyclone will turn into depression in the next 12 hours, which will result in further widespread rains in Karachi and other coastal parts of Sindh," Chaudry said late Sunday….

Once a powerful Category 4 storm, Cyclone Phet had weakened to a Category 3 storm by the time it came ashore over Oman on June 4, 2010. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this photo-like image of the storm at 10:40 a.m. local time on June 4. By that time, Phet had degraded into a Category 1 storm with winds of about 75 knots (140 kilometers per hour or 86 miles per hour). The storm’s swirling clouds cover most of northern Oman and all of the Gulf of Oman in this image. Though it is partially over land, the storm maintains a distinctive spiraling shape. In its northward trek over the Arabian Sea, Cyclone Phet gave Oman a glancing blow, cutting across the northeast edge of the country. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecast that the storm would re-emerge over the Gulf of Oman late on June 4 or early June 5, and move east towards Karachi, Pakistan, as a tropical storm.