Image of the Day: Typhoon Ewiniar Picks Up Steam

Hurricanes get all the attention in the United States, but their Pacific counterparts are powerful too. Tropical storms that reach hurricane force in the Pacific Ocean are called Typhoons.

On July 7, Typhoon Ewiniar swirled across the western Pacific offshore of China, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The eye of the storm is about 430 miles from Taiwan.

The storm brewed in southeast of the area shown here in the area around the Caroline Islands on June 29 before moving northwest. According to the forecast from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center on July 7, the storm had sustained winds of 98 mph and gusts up to 121 mph. The outer edges of the typhoon mingle with other cloud cover in the area, and the typhoon throws off long tendrils toward the south and east. Along the eastern edge of the storm is a sharp cloud boundary.

In this image, captured by NASA's Terra satellite on July 7, 2006, at 10:10 a.m. local time in Manila, the eye of the storm is approximately 700 kilometers away from Taiwan. The projected path for the storm was for the storm to continue northwest past Taiwan and then veer northeast to the Korean Peninsula.

--Bjorn Carey

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Credit: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center