File:Khanun Heads to South Korea (MODIS).jpg

English: After charting a zigzagging path that delivered damaging winds and rain to Japan’s Ryukyu Islands, Tropical Cyclone Khanun brushed Kyushu and began heading toward the Korean Peninsula in early August 2023. The storm’s long and wandering path was the result of high-pressure systems near China and southern Japan that blocked the storm and caused it to make two sharp turns.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired a true-color image of Tropical Cyclone Khanun on August 9. At that time, the storm was moving to the north-northeast towards the Korean Peninsula and roughly parallel to the western coast of Kyushu Island, Japan. Hours later, at approximately 8:00 p.m. EDT on August 9 (9:00 a.m. on August 10, local time) Khanun made landfall on the southeast coast of South Korea around 9:00 a.m. Maximum sustained winds near landfall were estimated at 50 mph (80 km/h).

Khanun is the sixth tropical storm of the 2023 typhoon season in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. Colorado State University meteorologists tracking Khanun’s accumulated cyclone energy (ACE)—a metric that incorporates both intensity and duration—report that the total ACE for Northwest Pacific storms was 122 as of August 7, 2023; the average at this point in the season over the past three decades is 88. With an ACE of 25, Khanun accounts for one-fifth of the total for Northwest Pacific storms in 2023.