At least one person was killed on Friday as Cyclone Mekunu gathered strength as it struck Oman, a day after lashing the Yemeni island of Socotra.
Omani civil defense authorities said the cyclone made land in the southern provinces of Dhofar and Al-Wusta.
"Latest observations show that tropical Cyclone Mekunu has intensified to category 2," with high wind speeds, Oman's directorate general of meteorology said on Twitter.
Thousands of residents near the coastal areas in the two provinces have been evacuated to safer shelters as winds up to of 170 kilometers (105 miles) per hour and torrential rainfall lashed the coastal areas, officials said.
Police said a 12-year old girl died when a gust of wind caused her to collide with a wall.
Civil defense said it had evacuated 10,000 people from schools and government buildings, mainly in the city of Salalah which has a population of 200,000.
Authorities have urged other residents to stay indoors.
Strong winds had already generated 12-metre-high (40-foot-high) waves offshore of the sultanate.
Mekunu was also headed towards the southeastern provinces of Yemen.
On Thursday, the storm pummeled the island of Socotra in war-torn Yemen, leaving at 40 people missing, including Yemenis, Indians and Sudanese.
Flash floods washed away thousands of animals and cut power lines on the isle in the Arabian Sea. Officials feared some may be dead.
Yemen's fisheries minister Fahad Kafin said that of those missing, 14 were Indian sailors who were at the island's port when the cyclone struck.
He told AFP that authorities have recovered the bodies of the five Yemeni nationals and two Indians and were still searching for the remaining 12.
He said that 1,000 families have been evacuated to safety after their homes were affected by flooding.
Saudi teams on the island managed to open the main road between the island's capital and its airport, he said.
The government declared the island in the northwest Indian Ocean, part of a UNESCO-protected archipelago for its rich biodiversity, a "disaster" zone.
The Yemeni high relief agency met with international humanitarian organizations in Aden late Thursday to discuss the situation, the country's Saba news agency reported.
They decided to set up 11 relief centers in Socotra to provide shelter for evacuees.
The meeting also discussed measures to provide aid to residents of three provinces in southeast Yemen also hit by the cyclone.
Across the border in Oman, authorities placed police and army on alert and closed schools until Monday in preparation for the cyclone.
State-run television said authorities had evacuated hundreds of residents from a small island off Salalah, the city where Oman's Sultan Qaboos was born.
The civil aviation authority closed Salalah airport until midnight on Saturday.
Omani forecasters warned Salalah and the surrounding area would get at least 200 millimeters (7.87 inches) of rain, over twice the amount of rain this city typically gets in a year. Authorities remained worried about flash flooding in the area's valleys and potential mudslides down its nearby cloud-shrouded mountains.
"Of course, for the citizen there is going to be a sense of fear of the consequences that can happen," said Brig. Gen. Mohsin bin Ahmed al-Abri, the commander of Dhofar governorate's police.
"We have been through a few similar cases and there were losses in properties and also in human life as well. But one has to take precautions and work on that basis."
Powerful cyclones are rare in Oman. Over a roughly 100-year period ending in 1996, only 17 recorded cyclones struck the sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula.
In 2007, Cyclone Gonu tore through Oman and later even reached Iran, causing $4 billion in damage in Oman alone and killing over 70 people across the Middle East.
The last hurricane-strength storm to strike within 160 kilometers (100 miles) of Salalah came in May 1959, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's archives. However, that cyclone was categorized as a Category 1 hurricane, meaning it only had winds of up to 152 kph (95 mph).
Mekunu, which means "mullet" in Dhivehi, the language spoken in the Maldives, is on track to potentially be the same strength as a Category 2 hurricane at landfall. It also comes just days after Cyclone Sagar struck Somalia.
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