Super typhoon Soudelor as it spins away from the Mariana Islands. Credit:Himawari 8 satellite A typhoon gains "super" status once sustained winds reach 130 knots, he said. NASA said the typhoon was dumping rain at the rate of 58 millimetres an hour, according to satellite readings. A satellite image shows the weather system north of Australia.

Projected path of the typhoon. Credit:JTWC The storm is expected to track towards northern Taiwan and hit mainland China in about four days' time, although it will have weakened by then, NASA said. Soudelor means a legendary ruler in the Pohnpeian language, which is spoken in the Caroline Islands, according to Guam's Pacific Daily News. The news service reported that the storm is the strongest this year, and prompted authorities in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands to declare "a state of disaster and significant emergency" on Monday. The island of Saipan had its power plant flooded, with hundreds of residents taking to shelters as power and water supplies were cut off, Pacific Daily News reported.

Soudelor's winds are forecast to exceed those of Cyclone Pam, which peaked at 143 knots (265 km/h) when it devastated Vanuatu earlier this year. El Nino link The big storm may add another boost to the El Nino in the central and eastern Pacific, which continues to mature into a "moderate to strong" event, said Andrew Watkins, manager of prediction services at the Bureau of Meteorology. Last month, Cyclone Raquel - the earliest ever recorded in the eastern Australian zone - and a series of typhoons and tropical lows boosted the El Nino by providing westward wind bursts along the Equator. Super typhoon Soudelor was "certainly quite intense" and was "causing a disruption in the trade winds", Dr Watkins said.

El Ninos are marked by the stalling or reversal of the normally easterly trade winds blowing along the equator. One result is that heat tends to build up in the central and eastern Pacific and rainfall patterns shift eastwards away from the Australian continent and south-east Asia. Dr Watkins noted that the season had got off to a stormy start with as many as 13 cyclones, typhoons or tropical depressions in the western Pacific, and 10 such storms in the eastern Pacific. "All have have been contributing" to the El Nino by disrupting the trade winds, he said. The bureau released its latest El Nino update on Tuesday, highlighting that sea-surface temperatures in all five key regions monitored have been at least 1 degree warmer than average for 12 weeks in a row. That period compares with a previous record eight consecutive weeks in the run-up to the super El Nino event of 1997-98.

According to monthly temperature measures, the current El Nino has exceeded the maximum temperature anomaly recorded during the 2006 peak but remains "well short of the 1982 and 1997 peaks", the bureau said. However, temperature peaks typically come late in the year. "The models are calculating things are going to continue to warm up," Dr Watkins said, adding the El Nino is likely to persist into the first quarter of 2016. The likely impact for Australian rainfall from the El Nino remains somewhat unclear. The Indian Ocean remains unusually warm, a set-up that favours rain particularly for the western half of the country, while the eastern half may be drier-than-average because of the El Nino influence, Dr Watkins said.

Three of the five international models surveyed by the bureau, however, point to the Indian Ocean Dipole [IOD] - a gauge of relative temperatures across the ocean - as tilting to its positive phase in August. That development may be bad news for farmers. (See above.) "Positive IOD events are often associated with lower rainfall in parts of central and south-eastern Australia," the bureau said.