Super typhoon intensifies at one of fastest rates ever

On Sunday morning, it was a tropical storm. By Monday morning, it had Category 5 winds. Super Typhoon Hagibis, currently moving near the Federal States of Micronesia in the western North Pacific Ocean, is a monster that gathered strength at one of the fastest rates ever observed on Earth.

The storm has a massive shield of towering thunderstorms surrounding a pinhole-like eye that is just a few miles across.

Its 160 mph winds firmly establish it as a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, looming as a behemoth on satellite following a period of extremely rapid intensification.

“This is the most intensification by a tropical cyclone in the western North Pacific in 18 hours since Yates in 1996,” tweeted Philip Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University. Maximum sustained winds increased at least 90 mph in 18 hours, nearly three and a half times the rate a storm would need to strengthen to constitute “rapid intensification,” based on the meteorological definition of that term.

During the peak of its extreme strengthening, Hagibis went from a tropical storm to a major hurricane-equivalent typhoon in just six hours.

Super Typhoon Hagibis intensified at a rate comparable to Hurricane Patricia in 2015, whose winds intensified by 120 mph in the eastern Pacific within 24 hours. That puts Hagibis in extraordinary company, considering that Hurricane Patricia was the most intense tropical cyclone ever observed in the Western Hemisphere, and the second-strongest tropical cyclone on record worldwide.