File:Mawar and Guchol 2005.jpg

Typhoon Mawar (left) is projected to reach Japan on August 25, 2005, bringing with it wind speeds of up to 120 knots or 138 miles per hour (1 knot = 1.15 mph). It is a Category 4 typhoon, capable of causing massive damage to buildings as well as creating extensive flooding. Tropical Storm Guchol (right), with maximum sustained winds of 55 knots (63 mph), is forecast to become a typhoon as well. A typhoon is a type of tropical cyclone, or a storm with maximum sustained winds of greater than 63 knots (73 mph). 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 is called a hurricane. Typhoons are large, rotating regions of wind, clouds, and thunderstorms formed over warm tropical oceans. 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.

Description from NASA Visible Earth

Typhoon Mawar (left) is posing photogenically with Tropical Cyclone Guchol in this satellite image. Both storms are far out in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, some 900 kilometers from Tokyo. They are traveling in parallel with each other, both headed roughly northwest at comparable speeds. Mawar, however, will strike mainland Japan on its projected course, and will have built to a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of over 320 kilometers per hour (200 miles per hour) as it strikes shore around August 25. Guchol, however, will never come close to shore if current projections are correct, and will remain a substantially weaker system with peak winds less than half the speed of Typhoon Mawar.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image at 10:10 a.m. local time, on August 22, 2005. At this time, Mawar had peak winds around 200 km/hr (125 mph) and Guchol has winds around 100 km/hr (60 mph).

The large image provided above has a resolution of 250 meters per pixel. It is available in additional resolutions from the MODIS Rapid Response Team.