Less than a week after Super Typhoon Meranti barreled down on East Asia, another storm spun into the region. At 1:35 p.m. local time (04:35 Universal Time) on September 19, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of Typhoon Malakas approaching Japan. At the time, Malakas was the equivalent of a category-3 storm, with maximum sustained winds of 195 kilometers (120 miles) per hour.
When this image was acquired, the storm’s center had already passed offshore of Taiwan. Heavy rain and high winds over Taiwan’s inland areas led to travel delays and the evacuation of thousands of people. Malakas later made landfall on the morning (local time) of September 20 on Japan’s Kyushu Island, according to news reports. Winds at that time measured 185 kilometers (115 miles) per hour.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.
