Typhoon Bolaven

On August 26, 2012, Typhoon Bolaven passed over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, the eye of the storm making landfall on Okinawa. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image when Bolaven’s eye was situated southeast of the island. CNN reported that Bolaven was the strongest typhoon to strike Okinawa in nearly 50 years, with winds of 259 km/h (161 mph). Unisys Weather reported that, on August 26, Bolaven was a Category 4 typhoon with winds of 115 knots (215 km/h). The storm had weakened by August 27, when the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) reported that the storm had maximum sustained winds of 70 knots (130 kilometers per hour). It nevertheless remained a strong storm, and the JTWC projected storm track showed Bolaven passing over the Yellow Sea and the Korean Peninsula. The left of the image is north.

Okinawa, Japan