During the last four years of the CyMISS (Tropical Cy clone Intensity M easurements from the ISS ) program, our team has acquired image sequences of several dozen powerful hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones scattered across the globe. During the busy 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, one of the better observed storms by the CyMISS program was Hurricane Harvey. January’s Image of the Month is of this historic hurricane created using images from a sequence of 240 photographs taken by the crew of the ISS on August 25, 2017 in support of the CyMISS project. When the four-minute photography session started at 21:21:00 GMT, Harvey was located at about 27.5° N, 96.5° W in the Gulf of Mexico and was rated as a strong Category 3 storm with sustained winds of about 201 kph (125 mph). The individual photographs from the original 240-image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before they were stitched together into a synoptic color mosaic covering an area of 1,800 by 1,200 kilometers. A high-resolution version of this synoptic mosaic with an image scale of 500 meters/pixel can be viewed by clicking on the image below.

The Image of the Month is a 3D image created using a pair of close up photographs of the 30-kilometer eye of Hurricane Harvey taken a few seconds apart around 21:23:08 GMT (4:23:08 PM CDT) about 5½ hours before it hit the Texas coast. Only the red channel of the original color images was used in order to cut through any atmospheric haze and maximize the visibility of the cloud features. These images were remapped to approximate an overhead view before being combined to create an anaglyphic 3D image (a pair of stereo glasses with a red filter over the left eye and a blue filter on the right is required to reproduce the 3D effect). The resulting stereo view, which can be seen at full size with a scale of 100 meters/pixel by clicking on the image below, covers an area of 150 by 100 kilometers and clearly reveals the structure in and around the eye of Harvey.

In the days ahead, Hurricane Harvey dumped record amounts of rain on Texas including the Houston area where NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) is located. Because of the historic flooding, our team had to wait two weeks instead of the usual couple of days before these images were available as JSC dealt with this natural disaster. Stereo data such as that shown here will one day help our team provide more accurate information on the state of hurricanes which will improve the accuracy of hurricane track and intensity forecasts in the future.

The goal of the ongoing CyMISS (tropical Cyclone intensity Measurements from the ISS) project is to acquire image sequences of intense tropical cyclones (TCs), such as hurricanes, to support the development of an improved remote sensing method to determine more accurately the strength of these destructive storms using stereoscopy. The CyMISS team at Visidyne would like to thank the crew of the ISS as well as the staff at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Johnson Space Center for their ongoing efforts. The original images are courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The work presented here is supported in part under CASIS Grant UA-2019-013.

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See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.