Tropical storm Chan-hom heads for Korea

Tropical storm Chan-hom is en route to Korea on 12 July, a day after it slammed into China's east coast as a super-typhoon, forcing over a million people to leave their homes.

Domestic flights have been grounded in South Korea as the storm - which was downgraded from a super-typhoon to a tropical storm several hours earlier by the Japan Meteorological Agency - moves across the region.

An advisory issued by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center at 5pm local time on 12 July (8am GMT) said that the centre of the storm was over the Yellow Sea at about 185 miles southwest of Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

The storm is forecast to move toward the north-northeast, before likely dissipating over North Korea on 13 July.

Mass evacuation

Authorities in China evacuated over a million people after Chan-Hom battered the country's south-eastern coast with 162kmph winds that struck near the port city of Ningbo, Zhejiang province on 11 July, before approaching Shanghai.

China's National Meteorological Centre (NMC) described the storm as the strongest typhoon to hit land in over 60 years.

In addition to the large-scale evacuations, 50,000 boats were forced to return back to port after waves reached up to 10 metres high off the coast.

All flights to and from the region were cancelled and bus services and speedboat ferry services stopped.

The storm passed through the Philippines earlier in the week before hitting Japan on 10 July, where it uprooted trees and damaged buildings, leading to at least 20 injuries.

This was the second time Southern China was hit by a typhoon this week. Typhoon Linfa displaced 56,000 people in southern Guangdong province on Thursday 9 July, according to Xinhua news agency.