The European Space Agency released a Copernicus Sentinel-3 image on October 30, 2026 that looks straight down into the eye of Super Typhoon Champi, captured on October 21 off the coasts of Taiwan and the Philippines. The storm was the strongest tropical cyclone of 2026 at that point, with maximum sustained winds of 296 km/h, and the open eye in the picture spans about 50 km.
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Nine days separate the pass of the satellite from the release, and the picture has become a record of the storm at its peak.
How Sentinel-3 reads a typhoon in thermal infrared
ESA’s image caption explains that the picture comes from the Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer aboard Sentinel-3, an instrument that measures thermal infrared radiance. The colors are assigned to brightness temperature, so the view is false-colour. The coldest cloud tops at the center of the storm reach about -70 degrees Celsius, the surrounding cloud areas range from -30 to -15 degrees, and the sea surface below averages around 25 degrees. A cloud top that cold sits near the top of the troposphere, which is the signature of the towering convection that wraps a mature eyewall.
The warm patch at the middle of the image is the eye itself, where air sinks and clouds clear enough for the sensor to see the ocean. That contrast, a ring of the coldest cloud around a hole of warm water, is what gives the scene its unsettling look. ESA’s caption says the storm caused flooding and damage in eastern Taiwan and produced waves up to 10 m near its center. The agency credits the image as containing modified Copernicus Sentinel data from 2026, processed by ESA.
Sentinel-3 belongs to the Copernicus Earth-observation program of the European Union, built and launched with ESA, and its radiometer is designed mainly to track sea and land surface temperature for climate records. Capturing a typhoon is a side benefit of a wide swath that sweeps across oceans every day. For forecasters, a thermal view like this one helps gauge how symmetric and how deep a storm’s convection is, two clues used to judge strength when no aircraft is flying through the system.
From the October 21 peak to Taiwan’s northeast coast
On the day of the capture, the Khaleej Times reported peak winds of 296 km/h, equal to a Category 5 storm, with Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration saying the island would be spared a direct hit. Earlier models had pointed to landfall at Eluanbi, the southern tip, on October 23. CWA forecaster Tseng Chao-cheng said extremely heavy rainfall was expected throughout the island until Saturday as the storm departed. In the Philippines, Wind Signal No. 1 covered Batanes, Cagayan, Isabela, Apayao, Ilocos Norte and Catanduanes, and the weather agency Pagasa said Champi would bring much-needed rain.
NASA’s own Worldview archive entry shows the same storm from another angle, a nighttime VIIRS composite from the NOAA-20 satellite taken in the early hours of October 21, with winds of 185 mph and several periods at Category 5 strength between October 19 and 21. A Star report the same day had the track heading toward China and Taiwan.
By October 23, Al Jazeera was reporting that the storm swept past the northeast of Taiwan, killing one person and injuring more than 500. More than 5,000 people were evacuated, and Yilan County had received 650 mm of rain since Thursday, with more than 400 mm on Friday alone. Crews were sent to restore power to about 56,000 households, and flight cancellations fell to 259 on Saturday from almost 1,000 on Friday. The CWA’s Lu Kuo-chen warned that the typhoon could slow near the island’s northeastern tip and prolong its impact. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center put winds at 185 km/h by then, so the storm had weakened sharply from the peak seen from orbit. That drop, from nearly 300 km/h to 185 km/h in two days, is the kind of swing that cooler water and the interaction with Taiwan’s mountainous terrain can produce, and it left the island with flooding and injuries rather than a catastrophic wind landfall.
El Niño and an unusually strong 2026 season
Forecasters have linked the season to the Pacific climate cycle. Ana Liza Solis, chief of Pagasa’s climate monitoring and prediction section, noted that typhoons and super typhoons occur more often during El Niño years. The UN has said this event could be unprecedented in strength, and Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said it was literally off the monitoring charts used over the past four decades, with a peak expected in December and effects lasting into 2027, per Al Jazeera. Pagasa maintains monitoring and advisory pages for the phenomenon.
Whether Champi stays the strongest cyclone of the year is a question for the months ahead. ESA’s caption fixes the record at 296 km/h for now, and any later storm would have to beat that figure, measured in the same way, to claim the record.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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