Tropical Storm Wukong formed in the western Pacific on August 12, 2006, as a tropical depression. Within a day, it had become organized enough to be classified as a tropical storm and earn its name. Wukong is the name of the Monkey King in a Chinese legend, “Journey to the West.” As of August 15, Wukong was projected to cross the southern end of the Japanese Islands on August 18. It was not predicted to become significantly more powerful, according to the Shanghai Daily News.
This photo-like image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on August 14, 2006, at 10:30 a.m. local time (01:30 UTC). Tropical Storm Wukong at the time of this image was a large, but open and weak system. It appears to have a large outer ring of clouds and storms, and a tighter, smaller ring closer to the center, but these clouds have not wound together or developed the strong circulation and spiral-arm cloud structures of a typhoon. No well-defined eye occupies the storm’s center. Tropical Storm Wukong had sustained winds of around 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour) near the time of this image, according to the University of Hawaii’s Tropical Storm Information Center.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team.
