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For the first time in 18 years, there are two typhoons swirling simultaneously through the Pacific Ocean, and a Japanese weather satellite, called Himawari-8, has captured this rare occurrence.
The twin typhoons are named Goni (on the left) and Atsani (on the right). The video, courtesy of Time, shows these typhoons especially clearly because Himawari-8 snaps photos of them every 10 minutes, unlike U.S. weather satellites, which do so every three hours at half the resolution.
The Vane calls the typhoons fraternal twins, developing at the same time a few hundred miles apart. Atsani became a super typhoon first, but is not expected to affect any landmass. Goni is moving closer to land, expecting to affect Taiwan and Luzon, an island owned by the Philippines with strong winds and rain. Most dangerously, weather modeling systems expect Goni to make landfall on Japan’s Kyushu island, home to more than 13 million people.
Time also reports that the last time we saw twin typhoons was when El Niño was going strong in October of 1997. We’re currently living through another El Niño, a weather system that tends to give birth to strong typhoons in the central Pacific. Here’s hoping that neither typhoon brings about destruction, remaining just a cool thing to look at on video.