Choose a better time to go.

Around twenty storms enter Philippine waters a year and eight or nine come ashore. Where matters as much as when: Cagayan Valley, Bicol and Eastern Visayas take most of them, while Palawan and the western Visayas are hit far less. The tracks also shift south as the season runs on, so mid-year is worst in the north and the later months worst for the central islands. From Wind Signal No. 3 the airports under it generally stop.

Two seasons rather than one: a smaller peak before the monsoon in May, and the real one through October and November. Fewer storms form here than in the Pacific, but the Bay of Bengal is shallow and funnel-shaped, so it is the surge they push ashore that closes the coast. Andhra Pradesh and Odisha take most of the landfalls; the Arabian Sea side at Mumbai and Goa is far quieter.

Guangdong and Fujian take most of the landfalls, but Shanghai loses more flights to storms that never arrive — a track running north up the coast is enough to empty Pudong without making landfall at all.

The two coasts have opposite bad seasons: Phuket and the Andaman side are wettest from May to October, the Gulf and Samui from November into December. Storms usually cross Vietnam first and arrive overland already weakened, so what closes a runway here is rain and thunderstorms rather than wind.

Barely a degree off the equator, which is too close for a cyclone to spin up at all — Vamei in 2001 is the only one on record anywhere near here, and it is in the archive on the main page. What delays flights is the afternoon convection of the two monsoons, and storms elsewhere in the region arriving as knock-on delays.

The central range rises to nearly four thousand metres and pulls storms apart as they cross, which shelters the western plain where Taoyuan sits. It does that by wringing the rain out of them, so the disruption is as often flooding and closed ground transport as wind at the airport itself.

Okinawa and the Ryukyus are in the path from June and take several close passes a year. Honshu's season is shorter and later — August into September — and a storm that gets that far north has usually weakened or begun turning extratropical, which widens its wind field rather than shrinking it. Tokyo loses flights to storms that never come near it.

A short, sharp season: almost nothing before August, then a few concentrated weeks. Storms reaching this far north are recurving and moving fast, which limits how long they sit over any one place but not how hard they blow. Jeju is on the recurve path and usually the first thing hit; Busan and the south coast far more often than Seoul.

Only two direct strikes since 1987, but the flight-stopping storm signal is raised almost every year.

Storms land between Hue and Da Nang far more than anywhere else; Ho Chi Minh City in the south is rarely affected.

The only entry here with no real off-season — a typhoon can strike within three days at any time of year.