Most storms give you one landfall story. Typhoon Dolphin is writing two. After forming in the Northwest Pacific on July 27, Dolphin spent eleven days and 47 forecast advisories marching toward — and then through — Japan's Okinawa region as a Category 1 typhoon early on August 7. Instead of the usual post-landfall decay, it emerged over the warm East China Sea and restrengthened: as of advisory 47 it is a Category 2 system with maximum gusts of 204 km/h and central pressure of 951 mb, bearing west-northwest toward a projected second landfall on China's Zhejiang coast — one of the most densely developed shorelines on Earth — around midday UTC on August 9. This brief reconstructs the storm's advisory trail as a working example of hazard intelligence converging in real time, inside a 2,166-event week that also kept 1,835 wildfires, 36 volcanic events, and the ongoing Kyushu earthquake response on the board.
What's confirmed and what's forecast: Dolphin's formation, its track to date, its Okinawa transit, and its current Category 2 strength are observed and verified. Everything about the Zhejiang landfall — timing, location, and its projected Category 1 strength at the coast — is a forecast from JTWC advisory 47 and can change with every update. Chan-Hom's approach to northern Japan is likewise a forecast. We label each below, and as always, the 7,442 formal warnings, watches, and advisories our occurrence filter set aside this week are used only as context, never counted as events. One transparency note specific to this story: tropical cyclone records travel through our pipeline as formal alerts until impact, so Dolphin's advisory-by-advisory data in this brief is drawn directly from the live DisasterAWARE feed.
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Reading the map: the solid purple line is Dolphin's observed best track — 47 six-hourly positions from formation near the dateline — with wind-field arcs at each day's fix, colored by intensity (yellow tropical storm through deep red at the July 29–31 Category 4 peak; the filled red arcs are today's gale field, reaching 265 nautical miles northeast of center). The dashed cyan line and shaded cone are the JTWC advisory-47 forecast: the projected path to the Zhejiang coast and the 120-hour uncertainty envelope — none of it has happened yet. Zoom in on the East China Sea to see the quadrant-by-quadrant wind radii detail; use the layer control (bottom right) to toggle Tropical Depression Chan-Hom's track toward northern Japan, plus this week's warning-level wildfires, volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods worldwide.
Typhoon Dolphin organized into a tracked system on July 27 (JTWC designation WP122026) and did nothing quickly. For a week and a half it worked west across the Northwest Pacific while the Joint Typhoon Warning Center issued advisories every six hours — 44 of them by the time the storm closed on Japan's southern islands. The open-ocean phase had its own drama: best-track data shows Dolphin peaking as a Category 4 with 130-knot winds from July 29 to 31, then shedding intensity over cooler water even as its gale field kept expanding — by August 2, 34-knot winds reached 240 nautical miles from center. The storm that reached Okinawa was weaker but much larger than the one that peaked at sea. In the DisasterAWARE feed, each advisory arrived as a structured update: position, maximum winds and gusts, central pressure, forward speed and bearing, distance-to-landfall, hours-to-landfall, and the projected landfall point itself, refreshed as the forecast track tightened.
By advisory 44, late on August 6 UTC, the picture had converged to specifics: a Category 1 typhoon at 26.9°N 130.4°E, maximum sustained winds of 148 km/h with gusts to 185, central pressure 957 mb, moving west-northwest at 19 km/h, 237 km and roughly 13 hours from a projected Okinawa landfall. The projection held. Dolphin crossed the Okinawa region in the early hours of August 7 UTC, close to the advisory-44 timing, and continued west-northwest into the East China Sea.
That's the part of the story most weather coverage ends on. The intelligence story is what the advisory trail looked like before the fact — because "when does the forecast converge" is the operational question for everyone with assets in the cone. Airlines reposition aircraft on it. Ports sequence closures on it. Insurers run pre-landfall accumulation checks on it — the exact workflow we detailed this week in our guide to hazard data for insurers. A forecast that converges 72 hours out is a planning tool; one that converges 13 hours out is an evacuation order. Dolphin's Okinawa track converged early and held, and the feed showed that stability advisory by advisory.
Storms that cross land usually pay for it. Dolphin's Okinawa transit was brief — the island chain is narrow, and the East China Sea beyond it is running warm — so instead of decaying, the storm reorganized. Between advisories 44 and 47, roughly 18 hours, the DisasterAWARE feed recorded the signature of intensification: central pressure falling from 957 mb to 951 mb, maximum gusts climbing from 185 km/h to 204 km/h, and the storm's Saffir-Simpson classification stepping up from Category 1 to Category 2.
As of advisory 47 (August 7), Dolphin sits at 27.2°N 127.2°E, northwest of Okinawa, tracking west-northwest at 17 km/h. The forecast — and everything from here forward is forecast — puts it on the Zhejiang coast of China around 12:00 UTC on August 9, weakening to Category 1 strength with winds near 139 km/h by landfall as it encounters shear and cooler shelf water. The margin of error on a 48-hour landfall projection is real, and JTWC updates every six hours.
What makes this second act the bigger story is exposure. The Zhejiang coastline south of Hangzhou Bay — Ningbo, Taizhou, Wenzhou — concentrates ports, aquaculture, petrochemical infrastructure, and tens of millions of residents in the storm's projected approach corridor. China's coastal provinces run some of the world's most practiced typhoon defenses, and a weakening Category 1 is a manageable event for them — but "manageable" still means preemptive fishing-fleet recalls, port sequencing, and evacuation staging decisions that all key off the same advisory stream documented above. The difference between act one and act two is the difference between a 1.5-million-person island prefecture and a coastal megaregion.
Where will Typhoon Dolphin make landfall? As of JTWC advisory 47 (August 7), Typhoon Dolphin is forecast to make its second landfall on the Zhejiang coast of China around 12:00 UTC on August 9, 2026, weakening to Category 1 strength by the coast. Its first landfall — across Japan's Okinawa region — occurred early on August 7 UTC. Forecasts update every six hours and landfall projections can shift.
How strong is Typhoon Dolphin? At advisory 47, Dolphin is a Category 2 typhoon: maximum sustained winds of 167 km/h, gusts to 204 km/h, central pressure 951 mb. It restrengthened after crossing Okinawa and is forecast to weaken to Category 1 before reaching China.
Did Typhoon Dolphin hit Okinawa? Yes. Dolphin crossed the Okinawa region as a Category 1 typhoon in the early hours of August 7 UTC, closely matching the timing projected in JTWC advisory 44 the previous day, then moved into the East China Sea and restrengthened.
How many storms are active in the Pacific right now? This window tracked six tropical systems: Typhoon Dolphin, Tropical Storm Bavi, Tropical Depression Kujira, newly formed Tropical Depression Chan-Hom, and post-tropical cyclones Genevieve and Fausto in the Eastern Pacific. Chan-Hom is forecast to reach northern Japan's Miyagi coast around August 11 at tropical-depression strength.
As it has been all summer, wildfire is the dominant event type on the planet: 1,835 wildfire events in ten days, 85% of the entire actual-event board, with 322 at warning severity. The belt runs where it has run all summer — the interior American West and western Canada, the Mediterranean rim from Iberia through Greece and Türkiye — sustained by the same heat-and-dryness regime we anatomized in the heat domes brief. The count is down from the 07-30 window's 1,853, which is statistical noise rather than relief; August is historically the belt's peak month, and the filtered-alert stream this week carried fresh Fire Weather warnings behind the active perimeters.
Thirty-six volcanic events — fifteen at warning level — made this one of the busier volcanic windows of the summer. The warning list reads like a Pacific Rim and Ring of Fire roll call: Etna (Italy), Semeru, Ibu, Dukono, and Lewotobi (Indonesia), Mayon (Philippines), Fuego and Santa María (Guatemala), Popocatépetl (Mexico), Sabancaya (Peru), Reventador and Sangay (Ecuador), Masaya (Nicaragua), and Aira (Japan). None produced a catastrophic eruption this window; all are the kind of persistent, ash-and-exclusion-zone activity that disrupts aviation and keeps local emergency managers on rotation. Eleven tsunami advisories — all seismic-triggered, none damaging — round out the geophysical picture.
Last week's brief anatomized the Kyushu cascade — the July 28 M7.1 that became tsunami bulletins, a fatal Kumamoto building collapse, and an aftershock sequence within two hours. Two weeks on, the event has moved from detection to response: the M7.1 and its companion USGS solution remain active in DisasterAWARE as response-support operations, and the aftershock sequence continued into this window, including a M5.6 near Tsunagi hours after the mainshock. The 93 earthquakes on this week's board — 22 at M5.5+ — also included a M7.5-class response operation continuing in Venezuela from June's doublet, and fresh M5.5–5.9 events from Peru to the Kermadecs to Vancouver Island's offshore ridge. Nothing this window approached the Kyushu event's scale; its response tail is the week's real seismic story.
Dolphin's landfall verification against the advisory-47 projection — the second act of the two-act structure this brief is built on — plus any post-landfall flood signature inland of Zhejiang. Chan-Hom's rainfall footprint over Tōhoku. Whether the volcanic warning cluster produces an escalation, with Semeru and Lewotobi the most active of the fifteen. And the fire belt's August peak.
Every number in this brief comes from the DisasterAWARE platform: 2,166 verified events deduplicated across live and historical feeds, each advisory of Dolphin's 47 arriving as structured data — position, intensity, pressure, landfall projection — machine-readable the moment JTWC issued it. That advisory stream is the same Event Intelligence API feed available to operations teams, and the pre-landfall exposure workflow it powers is detailed in our new insurance data guide. For what "event intelligence" means end to end — detection, verification, impact assessment — see our full explainer.
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Produced with DisasterAWARE® — the multi-hazard monitoring, alerting, and decision-support platform from Pacific Disaster Center. Data window: July 27 – August 6, 2026, with live cyclone advisories through August 7.
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