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. Some of those images along with an update on the CyMISS project were featured in a recent article which appeared in CASIS’ Upward – Magazine of the ISS National Lab (see “Tracking Hurricanes & Typhoons from Space”). Included in this feature article are spectacular 3D views of Tropical Cyclone Gita created by our project team using photographs taken by the ISS crew on February 14, 2018 – the day after photographs for last month’s Image of the Month were taken (see “CyMISS Image of the Month: Tropical Cyclone Gita”).

April’s Image of the Month is a view of Tropical Cyclone Marcus created using a sequence of 492 photographs (like the original shown above) taken by the crew of the ISS on March 22, 2018. When the eight-plus-minute photography session started at 09:17:00 GMT, the eye of Marcus was located at about 17.2°S, 106.4° E in the Indian Ocean south of Indonesia and west of Australia. Marcus had just begun weakening from its peak strength when wind speeds were estimated to be about 260 kph (160 mph) – a Category 5 storm on the Australian tropical cyclone intensity scale as well as the Saffir-Simpson scale used in the western hemisphere. A processed overhead view of the region around the eye of Tropical Cyclone Marcus, with an image scale of 200 meters/pixel, is shown below.

In order to create this Image of the Month, the individual photographs from the original 492-image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before they were stitched together into a synoptic color mosaic covering an area of 3,000 by 1,300 kilometers. Of particular note (at least for those used to viewing northern hemisphere storms) is the fact that Marcus 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.

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See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.