NASA Earth Observatory said Monday that late-October satellite images captured Super Typhoon In-fa near the Mariana Islands and the remnants of Typhoon Champi moving toward Alaska after months of elevated tropical cyclone activity in the Northwest Pacific¹.

The agency said the basin has been busy since Super Typhoon Sinlaku in April 2026, and that 25 named storms later it was still active in late October¹. NASA identified In-fa as the fifth typhoon to affect the Marianas this year¹.

The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera on the DSCOVR satellite recorded In-fa near the islands on Oct. 29, 2026, while Champi’s leftovers approached Alaska amid other Bering Sea storms, NASA said¹. Terra’s MODIS instrument imaged In-fa just west of the chain on Oct. 30¹.

NASA said In-fa was unusually intense then, nearly circular with a large eye — traits of rare annular tropical cyclones, which one analysis it cited puts at about 4 percent of western North Pacific storms¹. Those storms’ eyes average about 45 kilometers (30 miles) across versus about 25 kilometers for typical cyclones and often hold intensity longer in poor conditions, the piece said¹.

By the Oct. 29 EPIC view, Champi had undergone extratropical transition, NASA said, shifting from a warm-core tropical cyclone to a cold-core storm drawing energy from temperature contrasts¹. Gary Partyka, a meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said such transitions expand a storm’s wind field over a larger area even if winds do not necessarily strengthen¹.

Partyka said a midlatitude storm likely would have been over the Bering Sea anyway, but that Champi appeared intertwined with and helped intensify that system¹. NASA said Champi had earlier reached maximum sustained winds of nearly 300 kilometers (185 miles) per hour and brought damaging winds and heavy rain to Taiwan, Guam, parts of China and Japan despite narrowly missing Taiwan and Guam¹.

When remnants reached Alaska, the state avoided damage on the scale of ex-typhoon Halong in October 2025, NASA said, though some areas saw high winds and heavy rain and snow, according to news reports it cited¹. University of Alaska Fairbanks meteorologist Rick Thoman, cited by NASA, said Champi was the fourth ex-typhoon into Alaskan waters this year, after Bang-Lang, Dujuan and Choi-wan¹.

Partyka described 2026 as a particularly active year for Pacific tropical cyclones and called the strong El Niño underway a likely contributor, NASA reported¹. In the Northwest Pacific, that pattern tends to steer more storms north toward Guam, the Northern Marianas, Japan and the Korean Peninsula rather than west into East and Southeast Asia, the observatory said, citing some experts¹.

Sources

1. NASAThe Pacific’s Busy Storm Season12:01 AM

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