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. Funded by CASIS (Center for the Advancement of Science in Space) which manages the ISS US National Laboratory for NASA, this project has amassed a large collection of images of dozens of storms during the last four years. While a number of processed images have been released to the public over the years through various online and print outlets, the CyMISS team at Visidyne (the prime contractor of the project) wanted to share some of the best images we have been creating on a more regular basis.

March’s Image of the Month is a view of Tropical Cyclone Gita created using a sequence of 240 photographs (like the original shown above) taken by the crew of the ISS on February 13, 2018 not long after this Category Three storm had passed the island nation of Fiji. When the four-minute photography session started at 19:11:00 GMT, Gita was straddling the International Dateline in the South Pacific with the eye located at about 21.0° south, 178.6° east. Because the eye was situated only about 460 kilometers from the ground track of the ISS and a recently-delivered (and improved) Nikon D5 camera was employed, these photographs provided among the highest resolution views of the eye of a TC acquired for the CyMISS program with a pixel footprint of about 80 by 130 meters. A processed B&W overhead view of Gita’s irregularly shaped eye (taken in red light to reduce atmospheric scattering and improve the visibility of details), with an image scale of 100 meters/pixel, is shown below when the surface winds were estimated to be about 200 kph (125 mph).

In order to create this Image of the Month, 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 1,200 by 800 kilometers. Of particular note (at least for those used to viewing northern hemisphere TCs) is the fact that Gita is rotating in the clockwise direction because of its location in the southern hemisphere. 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 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 GA-2017-265.

Follow Drew Ex Machina on Facebook.

Related Reading

See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.