As regular readers of Drew Ex Machina are probably aware, in addition to being a writer, I am also a physicist specializing in the processing and analysis of remote sensing data from satellites and other platforms. One of the projects I have been working on over the past couple of years is called CyMISS (Tropical Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS). The purpose of this project is to develop an Earth orbiting system that determines the altitudes and temperatures of cloud tops near the eye of powerful tropical cyclones in order to estimate the strength of these storms much more accurately than can be done using existing remote sensing methods (see “A New Satellite-Based Method to Determine Hurricane Strength”).
After months of working through the appropriate channels in the ISS (International Space Station) program office at NASA to institute specific photographic protocols, the Tropical Cyclone Experiment is now an officially approved ISS experiment under their CEO (Crew Earth Observation) activities. While these data can not be used to produce quantitatively accurate cloud altitudes, photography from the ISS is uniquely suited to supply us with other information we need about tropical cyclones to support the development of the CyMISS system. During the last year, the team I work with has been actively engaged with NASA and the crew of the ISS to acquire image sequences of tropical cyclones as the ISS passes high over these destructive storms. We have already acquired some useful data during the course of 2014 that we have been analyzing with very promising results (see “ISS Tropical Cyclone Experiment”). As we are wrapping up work on the current phase of funding for CyMISS development, I wanted to take an opportunity to share a couple of videos we produced using the image sequences of tropical cyclones from the ISS.
This first video was created using a subset of an image sequence acquired as the ISS passed over Typhoon Vongfong. Vongfong formed in the Pacific Ocean on October 3, 2014 and reached category 5 intensity, with peak sustained winds of 285 km/hr, four days later before starting to weaken. The observations shown here were made during the ISS pass over this storm on October 10 – the day before it hit Japan. Despite having weakened to category 1, the storm still displayed a prominent eye. This video includes not only the original images taken from the ISS, but also a sequence of images we remapped to a common nadir-viewing projection to provide a clearer view of the eye of this storm despite the changes in viewing geometry over time during this pass.
Even though the northern hemisphere’s hurricane and tropical cyclone seasons officially ended months ago, our efforts to secure images of tropical cyclones has continued into 2015 focusing instead on the southern hemisphere as activity ramps up there. Unfortunately, since our experiment is performed on an “as available” basis and the ISS crew’s schedule has been so busy in recent months, we have not had as many opportunities to observe tropical cyclones as we might wish. But even when the ISS crew does have a chance to take images for us, Mother Nature does not always cooperate.
A perfect example of this is Tropical Cyclone Eunice. Eunice started off as a tropical disturbance in the western Indian Ocean on January 27, 2015. After being designated a tropical depression on January 28, it rapidly intensified as it moved eastward over the following days to a category 5 tropical cyclone becoming one of the most powerful such storms recorded in that basin. As luck would have it, the ISS passed over the storm twice on January 30, 2015 on successive orbits and the ISS crew was available to obtain long image sequences during both passes. While Eunice had been displaying a very prominent eye earlier in the day, by the time of the ISS observations, a thick layer of cirrus clouds had formed above the center of the storm and obscured the eye from our view during our pair of passes. This video shows Eunice as it appeared during these overpasses along with an enhanced close-up of the obscured eye of the storm.
Hopefully, our luck will improve over the course of 2015 so that we can get more useful data to support the continuing development of CyMISS.
Follow Drew Ex Machina on Facebook.
Related Reading
A description of the CyMISS project and a sample of some of its results can be found on this web site’s CyMISS Page. Related posts include:
“ISS Tropical Cyclone Experiment”, Drew Ex Machina, November 10, 2014 [Post]
“A New Satellite-Based Method to Determine Hurricane Strength”, Drew Ex Machina, June 18, 2014 [Post]
“A Little Piece of the ISS”, Drew Ex Machina, April 5, 2014 [Post]
General References
P.C. Joss, A.T. Stair, J.G. DeVore and G.E. Bingham, “A New Method for Accurate Remote Measurement of Tropical Cyclone Intensities”, Poster at AGU Science Policy Conference (Washington, DC; June 16-18, 2014), Poster # NH-12, 2014 [Poster]
“The Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS (CyMISS) (TROPICAL CYCLONE)”, NASA ISS Web Site, [Link]