Typhoon Mawar moved across the island of Guam this week and was recorded by different satellites. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this is the most intense storm to hit the island in 60 years.
The island of Guam is about 2,400 km east of the Philippines, and the storm reached the place through the waters of the Pacific Ocean. In the images below, the typhoon is approaching in a northeasterly direction, heading towards the Philippine Sea.
In another publication, NOAA revealed images of Earth taken by the Himawari-9 satellite. “Super typhoon Mawar is easy to find moving across the Pacific,” they wrote in the publication. At the time of the tweet, the typhoon was heading towards the northeast Philippines and Taiwan.
The storm was also observed by the Sentinel-3 satellite. It is part of the European Union’s Copernicus Program and captured images of the typhoon in visible light earlier in the week. They show the size of the storm when it reached the island of Guam:
Typhoons are a type of tropical cyclone, a term used by meteorologists to describe rotating cloud and storm systems. For a cyclone to emerge, it needs certain conditions, such as weather disturbances, warm tropical oceans, humidity, and relatively light winds.
If conditions persist long enough, they can come together to form high winds, large waves and flooding. When the winds of tropical cyclones reach 119 km / h or more, the phenomenon becomes a hurricane, typhoon or cyclone, with the name varying according to the origin of the storm.
Mawar is considered a super typhoon due to the speed of its winds, which blew at over 240 km/h as it moved through the water. The storm caused heavy rain and flooding on the island, and local authorities are still assessing the damage.
Source: The New York Times; Via: Space.com
