How a cocktail of rogue storms and climate chaos unleashed deadly flooding across Asia

(CNN) — Looking at the weather map on his computer and seeing three tropical storms forming simultaneously across Asia in late November, climatologist Fredolin Tangang’s first thoughts drifted to the 2004 disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow.”

The film, in which three massive storms plunge the earth into a new ice age, goes beyond the realms of reality. But there was something about the formation of these weather systems swirling across his screen that made Tangang sit up.

They were not the strongest storms this year. But they were “unusual,” said Tangang, emeritus professor at the National University of Malaysia.

One was churning near the equator off the coast Indonesia – an area where storms rarely take shape because the planet’s spin is too weak there to whip them into existence