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Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Geo-Pic: Mapping a Hurricane from the "Outside In"

Found this post from NASA's Earth Observatory an interesting perspective to storm data.



 Quick "Cut & Paste" Description: 

".... one satelliteCloudsat—peered inside the storm and observed its vertical structure. It did so with acloud-profiling radar that sent pulses of energy toward Earth and recorded the strength of the signal that bounced off ice and water particles."

"....The bottom map shows the storm as observed by Cloudsat around 2 p.m. local time (18:00 Universal Time) on October 29, 2012. The image shows a cross-section—what the storm would look like if it had been sliced near the middle and viewed from the side. (Watch this animation to see how Cloudsat collects data).... "

 Image: Vertical "cut-away" of storm precipitation: 


" ... The top image, acquired the same day by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Aqua satellite, is shown for reference. The yellow line is the north-to-south track that CloudSat took over the storm.
In the Cloudsat data, the darkest blues represent areas where clouds and raindrops reflected the strongest signal back to the satellite radar. These areas had the heaviest precipitation and the largest water droplets. The blue line in the center of the image is the freezing line; ice particles formed above it, raindrops below..." 


Credits:
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using CloudSat FirstLook data provided courtesy of the CloudSat team at Colorado State University. Caption by Adam Voiland.

Instrument: 
CloudSat - CPR

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