Typhoon Champi, a Category 3 storm, is spinning across the western Pacific, breaking records as it goes. On Thursday, the storm took on a highly unusual shape, with a 70-mile wide eye. Storms with eyes, in which the air sinks near the center of lowest air pressure, and calm winds are found at the surface, are typically just 10 to 20 miles in diameter.
As the Capital Weather Gang blog noted, the eye is so large that, based on the storm's rate of forward speed, someone under the storm would experience as many as eight hours of relative calm before "getting slammed" again by the storm's eyewall.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if some birds are taking shelter there,” tropical cyclone expert Phil Klotzbach told the blog.
If the eye were placed over New York City, it would encompass the entire city all the way out to parts of Long Island, coastal Connecticut, the Hudson Valley of New York, suburban New Jersey and parts of eastern Pennsylvania.
The storm is part of a small club of powerful tropical cyclones known as "annular" storms. They tend to develop very large eyes in the center along with a resilient ring of massive thunderstorms surrounding this eye. However, such storms usually don't have a larger set of rainbands spiraling around the storm as most other tropical cyclones do.
These storms can be longer-lasting than other tropical cyclones which have different structures.
Rapid scan video of Typhoon Champi via Himawari8. GOES-R will carry similar advanced imagers https://t.co/W2J0cK7h6D pic.twitter.com/AqjmAMXv7V— NOAA Satellites (@NOAASatellites) October 22, 2015
Typhoon #Champi via #Himawari True Color using @CIRA_CSU's Hybrid Atmospherically Corrected (HAC) method pic.twitter.com/jjDuoqnpoo— Dan Lindsey (@DanLindsey77) October 22, 2015
Beautiful annular Typhoon #Champi snap shot from the Himawari satellite. You could get lost in that big dark eye... pic.twitter.com/wFVNswb1Sy— Michael Ventrice (@MJVentrice) October 22, 2015