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7-Day Animation of Mangkhut Affecting the Philippines

1,265 views · Published 18 September 2018 · 0:31 · Indexed 30 September 2026

Channel: NASA Video · 2018 · Science & Technology

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In the past week, Typhoon Mangkhut has affected the Philippines, mainland China, and Hong Kong, as shown in this 7-day animation of NASA's satellite-based IMERG precipitation product. 

The upper frame shows the storm-total accumulation starting at 0000 UTC on September 11, 2018 (8 p.m. EDT on Sept. 10). Storm-total accumulations in excess of 4 inches stretched from Manila to the northern tip of Luzon Island where the rainfall triggered deadly landslides.

The lower frame shows the short-term accumulation in a 3-hour period that slides from the beginning to the end of the 7-day-long movie. The sliding 3-hour accumulation clearly shows how Mangkhut's compact eyewall prior to its Philippines landfall was replaced by a much larger, ragged eyewall thereafter. In some cases, interactions with mountainous islands greatly reduce a tropical cyclone's rainfall, but in this case, Typhoon Mangkhut was too powerful to succumb to these mountain interactions. 


NASA's GPM or Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite provides information on precipitation from its orbit in space. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency or JAXA. GPM also utilizes a constellation of other satellites to provide a global analysis of precipitation that are used in the IMERG calculation.
 
At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, those data are incorporated into NASA's IMERG or Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM. IMERG is used to estimate precipitation from a combination of passive microwave sensors, including the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission's core satellite's GMI microwave sensor and geostationary IR (infrared) data. IMERG real-time data are generated by NASA's Precipitation Processing System every half hour and are normally available within six hours. 

For more information about IMERG, please visit https://pmm.nasa.gov/. 

For storm history and NASA images on Mangkhut, visit: 
https://blogs.nasa.gov/hurricanes/2018/09/10/mangkhut-nw-pacific-ocean-2018/ 

Credit: NASA/JAXA/NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

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