As the Artemis II mission (which launched on 01 April) was coming to its successful end late in the day on 10 April 2026, the Orion crew capsule was approaching a landing site in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California. The Orion capsule generated immense heat and a very bright glow as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere — and the GOES-18 (GOES-West) GLM instrument interpreted that bright signature as a southwest-to-northeast streak of lightning.

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A somewhat unusual event could be found on the morning of 10 April 2026 when twin tropical cyclones could be found in the western Pacific. Since each storm was on the other side of the equator, the two systems were rotating in opposite directions. To the north was Sinlaku, a developing storm that is projected to intensify into typhoon strength with the potential to bring adverse impacts to Guam on Monday the 13th. To the south is Maila, a storm that is weakening from its peak strength and which was featured in the Blog earlier this week. Here is an animation of both storms from the Himawari-9 True Color product; remember, unlike the GOES series the Advanced Himawari Imager has a true green channel in addition to its red and blue channels, making for a product that looks slightly different when compared to the American satellites (which assume that a channel that has strong vegetation reflectance is a reasonable proxy for green).

NOAA’s satellite-derived seat surface temperatures, courtesy of the Office of Satellite and Product Operations, show sea surface temperatures around 29 C (84 F) for both systems. However, Maila is in a region of stronger shear and moving toward a region of colder sea surface temperatures, and so it is expected to continue to weaken. Here is an inset of the SST map showing the warm waters around the equator.

While the storms look similar on the visible wavelength imagery, Maila and Sinlaku look rather different on the AHI Band 13 (infrared window) satellite loop. This product shows warmer cloud tops for the southern storm, indicative of weaker convection.

However, that weather convection does not necessarily translate to weaker winds. Here is a mosaic of winds observed by the OSCAT-3 scatterometer. Note how Maila still has plenty of winds greater than 50 knots encircling a tight center of rotation. While this storm is weakening, as of this set of images it is still a Category 1 cyclone and still has the potential for negative impacts to the eastern islands of Papua New Guinea.

The CIMSS MIMIC-TPW2 product also show the twinned nature of these two systems, with clear signals of cyclonic, but mirrored, rotation on either side of the Equator. Note the extreme levels of total precipitable water just to the west of New Guinea on the left side of the animation. Also evident at around 30 S are the remains of Vaianu, a former category 3 tropical cyclone that now shows clear signs of extratropcial evolution.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Visible images that included overlays of GLM Flash Points and the Fire Mask derived product (above) showed a cluster of thunderstorms that was moving eastward across the Texas Panhandle late in the day on 09 April 2026. Frequent lightning activity associated with this convection ignited 2 wildfires in Oldham County, northwest of Amarillo (KAMA) — and each of these fires produced small smoke plumes that drifted northward from their respective thermal signatures.

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10-minute Full Disk scan JMA Himawari-9 AHI Infrared images (above) showed Cyclone Maila as it rapidly intensified to a 125-kt Category 4 storm (ADT | SATCON) just southwest of the Solomon Islands on 07 April 2026. Maila became the most intense tropical cyclone on record that far north in the Solomon Sea.

A Himawari-9 Target Sector was positioned over Maila until 1449 UTC, providing images every 2.5 minutes — which gave a smoother depiction of the evolution of Maila’s eye during rapid intensification (below). The coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures were -90ºC and colder (yellow pixels embedded within dark purple areas) — for example, at 0107 UTC and 0912 UTC. No -90ºC pixels were seen in the 10-minute Full Disk scan Infrared images, highlighting the value of 2.5-minute Target Sector imagery for capturing subtle details.

Maila had been moving through an environment characterized by low values of deep-layer wind shear (below), a factor which favored intensification.

Another factor favoring intensification was the warm water that was present in the portion of the Solomon Sea where Maila had been slowly meandering for several days (below).

Microwave imagery from DMSP-18 (below) displayed the eyewall structure of Maila at 1749 UTC — which was partially eroded along its eastern edge at that time.

A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image from RCM-3 (below) sampled wind speeds as high as 118 kts in the NW quadrant of Maila at 1914 UTC.

A toggle between VIIRS Day/Night Band images from NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 (below) highlighted the eye and eyewall of Maila after sunrise on 08 April — with deep convection very prominent within the eastern semicircle of the eyewall.

Wind shear, Sea Surface Temperature, Ocean Heat Content, DMSP, ADT and SATCON images and plots were sourced from the CIMSS Tropical Cyclones site.

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