Noul came ashore at Pinghai with winds of 162kph, Hong Kong dropped to a No. 8 signal, and 350 flights were cancelled

The signal came down before the rain did.

Hong Kong had its second-highest tropical cyclone signal, No. 9, up overnight, and replaced it with the No. 8 signal during Sunday morning. By then Noul had already crossed the coast. Agence France-Presse, whose report Hong Kong Free Press carried, put the centre of the typhoon over land at around 3:50 a.m. local time, which is 7:50 p.m. Saturday in New York, near the town of Pinghai in Guangdong province and about 80 kilometres northeast of Hong Kong. That timing and location come from the state broadcaster CCTV, as does the figure for maximum sustained winds near the eye at landfall, 162 kilometres per hour, and the assessment that Noul is the strongest typhoon to strike China so far this year.

The Hong Kong Observatory said Noul was moving steadily into inland Guangdong and weakening progressively, but that gales were still affecting many places over Hong Kong, with occasional storm force winds over high ground.

Then the tallies. The Hong Kong government reported it had received more than 100 reports of fallen trees and that nine people were injured. The airport's own website showed at least 350 passenger flights departing from and arriving at Hong Kong cancelled on Sunday. Authorities in Guangdong raised the province's disaster relief emergency response to its third-highest level on Sunday morning, and work and rail services in the province were suspended.

The storm is not finished. CCTV said Noul will move inland and bring strong winds and rain to Jiangxi, Hunan and Hubei, and that the rainfall it carries could last through Tuesday, reaching provinces as far north as Henan and Shandong.

One number is deliberately left vague here, and the reason matters. The figure for people moved out of the storm's path has been reported at widely different levels by different outlets on Sunday, from more than 340,000 in this report to figures more than twice that elsewhere. They are snapshots taken at different hours of a number that rose all weekend, and no single authority and timestamp could be tied to the larger ones from this desk. So the AFP figure is the one carried, and the higher ones are noted as existing rather than repeated as fact.

There is no linkable primary document behind this item. The underlying statements are a CCTV broadcast, a government tally given to reporters, an airport flight board that changes by the hour and an Observatory bulletin that has since been superseded, and none of them is published as a fixed record this desk could reach and read on Sunday morning. The item therefore rests on the credited AFP report, with each figure attributed to the authority that gave it.