Typhoon Vamco is forecast to cross into the Central Pacific Ocean early next week and may change its name to a hurricane. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center is forecasting Vamco to near the Semichi Islands of Alaska. The Semichi Islands are a cluster of small islands in the Near Islands group of the Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and don’t usually see tropical (or extra-tropical) systems.

The MODIS instrument’s image showed that Typhoon Vamco is a well-formed storm. It has a small, distinctive eye defined by a wall of clouds. In the image there were bands of clouds that spiral out from the eye that form a tight, symmetric circle, another sign of a powerful storm.

Forecasters expected the typhoon to continue to strengthen into a Category 4 Super Typhoon by August 21. The storm was not expected to hit land.

NASA has released a video of Hurricane Bill today from the GOES-14 satellite. The video was put together from a series of still frames taken by the satellite using both infrared and visible imagery and provides different views of Hurricane Bill on August 20.

Earlier this summer, NASA launched the latest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-O. Recently operations have been turned over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the satellite was renamed GOES-14. The satellite is still being tested in orbit, and it captured video of Hurricane Bill on August 20, while it was on its way to Bermuda.

The spectacular video is a collection of a few quick movies put together by the GOES-14 team from the NASA GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The video includes an impressive zoom-out, showing how big the hurricane is, relative to the hemisphere. Bill is a large hurricane, more than 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) across, and the storm’s partially cloud-filled eye is nearly 50 kilometers (31 miles) wide.

On August 20, the date of the movie, Hurricane Bill had sustained winds of 135 mph, making it a powerful Category 4 storm. At that time hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 80 miles from the center. On August 21, Bill’s sustained winds were near 110 mph and hurricane force winds extended up to 115 miles.