Typhoon Champi came within about 12 miles of Guam’s southern tip on Oct. 18 with sustained winds of 185 mph, a strength it shared with Sinlaku as the highest of any tropical cyclone anywhere this year. The eye stayed offshore, which spared the island the worst of the storm’s core. Homes were damaged and trees came down across Guam, though the island avoided a direct strike from the eyewall, the ring of the fiercest winds that surrounds the calm center of a typhoon.
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A miss of a dozen miles is thin for a storm of that class, because the strongest winds sit in a narrow ring around the eye. The reporting says the core stayed mostly offshore, and the damage that did occur came from the outer wind field and rain bands rather than from a direct strike.
The closest pass and what stayed offshore
AccuWeather meteorologist Jesse Ferrell wrote in an October storm report that Champi passed within 12 miles of the southern tip on Oct. 18 and that the core of extreme winds stayed mostly offshore, though it still damaged homes and knocked down trees. The same report, published Oct. 26 and updated Oct. 30, called Champi one of the five typhoons to affect the Mariana Islands in 2026, alongside Sinlaku, Bavi, Saudel and In-fa.
The wind figure is one-minute sustained speed, the measure used for a Saffir-Simpson category. At 185 mph the storm sat well above the 157 mph threshold for Category 5, a peak Meteored described as the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane. The National Weather Service forecast office in Guam maintains the formal advisories for the island group.
Several details frame how unusual the strength was. Sinlaku and Champi share the year’s top reading of 185 mph, and NASA described Champi as reaching nearly 300 km/h, with some observers calling it one of the season’s strongest storms. AccuWeather ranked the pair together as the strongest tropical cyclones on Earth this year. Guam also sits inside a region where the typhoon season has been elevated since April.
Taiwan took the worse hit
After Guam the storm continued west toward Taiwan, which it narrowly skirted. Citing Focus Taiwan, AccuWeather reported one person killed by waves and more than 600 injured, with over 340,000 customers losing power. Taiwan logged more than 9,000 damage reports, over 3,000 of them for infrastructure, and Yilan County saw more than 2 feet of rain.
Guam’s outcome was gentler by comparison, and the contrast came down to geography and track, with Taiwan facing the typhoon’s wind and rain head-on while Guam watched it pass to the side: NASA’s Earth Observatory said Champi brought damaging winds and heavy rain to both places and also to parts of China and Japan.
The Taiwan toll carries a lesson about scale. Waves, power losses and heavy rain together produced more than 600 injuries in a single storm, and Focus Taiwan’s tally of customers without electricity passed 340,000. The one death was attributed to waves, a hazard that often outruns the wind forecast. Photographs of damage in Keelung from Oct. 24 show how the effects extended along the island’s northern coast.
From Pacific monster to Alaskan remnant
The storm did not end in the tropics. NASA’s Earth Observatory feature said Champi’s remnants went through extratropical transition and approached Alaska in the final days of October, crossing the Bering Sea. Gary Partyka, a NASA Goddard meteorologist, said the remnants probably fused with a midlatitude low that was already developing over the sea, deepening it.
By then the forecast for the state was concrete. A Meteored report from Oct. 29 listed high-wind warnings, winter storm warnings and a flood watch tied to the storm and the lows behind it, and Alaska Public Media relayed National Weather Service forecasts of coastal flooding at Hooper Bay and high surf at Nome and Kotzebue in a report from KNOM. Partyka called a strong El Niño a likely contributor to the Pacific’s activity.
Alaska’s reception was mixed. Meteored’s Oct. 29 report listed gusts over 60 mph in parts of the Alaska Range, 10 to 15 inches of snow near Thompson Pass and forecast guidance of 15 to 20 inches of rain over Gulf of Alaska areas through the following Thursday. NASA noted the state avoided the catastrophic damage ex-typhoon Halong caused in October 2025, though some areas saw high winds, heavy rain and snow.
Champi’s wind speed came from AccuWeather’s reporting, not from a final best-track analysis, and agencies sometimes revise peak intensity after the season ends. Until the Guam office and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center publish post-season reviews, the 185 mph figure and the 12-mile miss distance stand as the working record for the island’s closest brush with a storm of that size.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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