There were two tropical cyclones in the West Pacific this past week. Koni went through the central Philippines (below and to the left of center) as a tropical storm where it dumped heavy rains before becoming a minimal typhoon with maximum sustained
winds of 75 mph over the South China Sea. It crossed the island of Hainan, and
then weakened slightly and made landfall on the coast of northern Vietnam (left).
Imbudo, meanwhile, became a super typhoon with winds of 150 mph before
striking the Island of Luzon in the northern Philippines (center) where it did
extensive damage and was responsible for at least 9 deaths. Both of these
storms were spawned by an intra-seasonal oscillation that moved eastward
across the West Pacific ocean.
The image above shows the rainfall totals associated with these two storms. The near-real time observations were collected by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)-based, Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (MPA) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Areas of the central and northern Philippines received upwards of 12 inches of rainfall as a result (red areas). Combined, the two systems generated a broad area of very heavy rain from well east of the Philippines to the mainland coast (red and yellow areas). White crosses mark the positions of each cyclone as it crossed the western Pacific. Accumulations are for the period of July 15-23, 2003.
TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency, NASDA. Additional images of this event, including animations, are available on the TRMM Website.
Images produced by Hal Pierce (SSAI/NASA GSFC) and captions by Steve Lang (SSAI/NASA GSFC).
The Tropical Rainfall Measureing Mission captured these observations of Typhoons Koni and Imbudo as they dumped heavy rains across the Phillipines, southern China, and Vietnam over the week of July 15.
This image shows rainfall totals in the Western Pacific from September 26 to October 2, 2011, when Typhoon Nesat and Super Typhoon Nalgae caused intense flooding and other storm damage in the Philippines and southeastern Asia.