Typhoon Ewiniar formed in the western Pacific on June 29, 2006, a hundred miles south of the Yap Islands in the Federated States of Micronesia. The tropical depression gathered power and size as it traveled in a zigzagging fashion over the next several days, tracking northwest, then east, northwest again, then north. It passes almost directly through the Yap Islands before turning northwest yet again on a projected track towards the southern end of Japan. Fortunately for the island residents, Ewiniar was still a tropical storm during its passage through the Yap Islands. As of July 3, 2006, Typhoon Ewiniar was 550 kilometers (350 miles) northwest of the Yap Islands.
This photo-like image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite on July 2, 2006, at 2:45 p.m. local time (04:45 UTC). At this time, the tropical storm had a misshapen but vaguely round structure. Most of the islands of the area, including Yap, are hidden under the clouds, though Mindanao in the Philippines is visible well to the storm’s west. Sustained winds in the storm system were estimated to be around 105 kilometers per hour (65 miles per hour) near the time the image was captured, according to the University of Hawaii’s Tropical Storm Information Center. Ewiniar, still a tropical storm at the time of this Aqua image, gathered power in the next 12 hours to become a full-fledged typhoon.
References & Resources
NASA image by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data obtained from the Goddard Earth Sciences DAAC.
