Images & Animations
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Credit
Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC
Typhoon Matsa wreaked havoc on both Taiwan and China as it moved ashore. The storm closed schools, businesses, and government offices in both countries and spurred millions to evacuate. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of Matsa on August 5, 2005, just before the storm made landfall over mainland China, shown in the upper left corner of the image. At this time, Matsa entirely covered Taiwan, the large island just southeast of China.
Like all typhoons, Matsa is a large, rotating region of wind, clouds, and thunderstorms formed over warm tropical oceans. To qualify as a typhoon, a cyclonic storm must have sustained winds greater than 117 kilometers per hour or 73 miles per hour. At the time this image was taken, Matsa had winds of 150 kilometers per hour (90 miles per hour). While the high winds, heavy rains, tornadoes, and storm surges caused by typhoons are often highly destructive in terms of human lives and property, they form an important part of the biosphere by transferring heat energy from the tropics to the mid-latitudes and polar regions. A tropical cyclone that is located in the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the International dateline is called a typhoon; a similar storm in the North Atlantic Ocean is called a hurricane.
Metadata
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Sensor
Aqua/MODIS -
Visualization Date
2005-08-05
