Typhoons: El Niño fuels an extraordinary season in the Pacific
· BehindLines newsroom
The western Pacific is going through an exceptionally active tropical cyclone season in 2026, and El Niño is, according to NASA, a likely contributor and, according to the BBC, an aggravating factor. In late October, NASA instruments photographed Super Typhoon In-fa near the Mariana Islands, just as the remnants of Typhoon Champi were heading for Alaska.
A "doughnut" typhoon seen from space
On 29 October, the EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite captured In-fa near the Mariana Islands. The next day, the MODIS instrument on the Terra satellite photographed it just west of the archipelago. NASA describes an unusually large eye and an almost circular shape, features of what is called an annular cyclone, which meteorologists sometimes nickname a "doughnut" or a "truck tyre". These storms are rare: an analysis cited by NASA puts them at 4% of cyclones in the north-western Pacific. Their eye averages 45 kilometres across, against about 25 for an ordinary cyclone, and they hold their strength longer in unfavourable conditions. That makes In-fa the fifth typhoon this year to hit the Mariana Islands.
A season that began in April
Activity has been high in this basin since April, when Sinlaku became a super typhoon and struck Guam, the northern Mariana Islands and other islands in the region. Twenty-five named storms later, the basin was still very busy in late October. Champi, for its part, lost its tropical characteristics to become an extratropical storm that was aiming for Alaska across the Bering Sea.
The role of El Niño
The BBC links this run of storms to the El Niño phenomenon, which pushes typhoons to form further east and to stay longer over warm water, and so to strengthen. The UK Met Office forecasts an El Niño this year that it judges the strongest in living memory, expected to last until February or March. Last month the Japan Meteorological Agency recorded surface waters in the equatorial Pacific 4 °C above normal, a record since 1949, against 3.6 °C in December 1997. According to the BBC, accumulated cyclone energy forecast for the region could nearly double the thirty-year average.
In October, Champi, comparable to a category 5 hurricane with winds of 295 km/h, almost paralysed Taiwan without making landfall. Flights by the hundreds were scrapped across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, and power was cut to 15,000 homes in Okinawa.