For the past five years, NASA’s Tropical Cyclone Experiment was performed in support of the CyMISS (Tropical Cy clone intensity M easurements from the ISS ) project funded by CASIS (Center for the Advancement of Science in Space) which manages the ISS US National Laboratory for NASA. The goal of CyMISS was to acquire image sequences from the ISS of intense tropical cyclones (TCs), such as hurricanes and typhoons, to support the development of an improved remote sensing method to determine more accurately the strength of these destructive storms using stereoscopy.

Because of the technical limitations of such photography even when using our specially desiged photography protocol, performing meaningful, quantitative pseudo-stereo reconstructions of the storms observed is not possible using these images because of the lack of required precision pointing information. But these image sequences have been used successfully to meet the following, more limited objectives:

– Characterize the scene structure near the eye of a tropical cyclone on spatial scales of 100 meters or better.

– Characterize the persistence of scene structure and how it evolves over the course of 100 to 200+ seconds with a temporal resolution on the order of one second.

– Provide realistic image sequences to support the development of pseudo-stereo reconstruction software that will be capable of absolute altitude accuracies of 100 meters.

ISS astronaut photography was the only practical means of providing the data we required. The resolution and imaging rate from weather satellites are too low while commercially provided satellite imagery has more resolution than we require and covers too small an area. While these ISS image sequences could not be used for precision cloud altitude measurements, they were sufficient to create mosaics of the storms being observed as well as stunning 3D images.

During the course of the CyMISS program, we have periodically shared some of the best images we have produced. Now that we are wrapping up this CASIS-funded project, we wanted to present the ten best images from the program based on page views of shared images. Click on the following images to view full-resolution versions. A detailed description of the storm and images can be accessed by clicking on the titles.

The CyMISS team at Visidyne would like to thank the crews of the ISS as well as the staff at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Johnson Space Center for their efforts over the last five years. The original images are courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The work presented here was supported in part under CASIS Grant UA-2019-013.

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See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.