On July 7, 2006, Typhoon Ewiniar swirled in the western Pacific Ocean offshore of China, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The storm began brewing in the area around the Caroline Islands (southeast of the area shown here) on June 29 and moved northwest, roughly parallel with the Philippines, over the next few days. According to the forecast from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center on July 7, 2006, at 18:00 Zulu time (2:00 a.m., July 8, local time in Manila), the storm had sustained winds of 85 knots, with gusts up 105 knots (1 knot is about 1.15 miles per hour). The projected path at that time was for the storm to continue northwest past Taiwan and then to veer northeast to cross the Korean Peninsula as a tropical storm on July 10.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on July 7, 2006, at 10:10 a.m. local time in Manila (02:10 UTC). In this image, the eye of the storm is approximately 700 kilometers away from Taiwan. 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.