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 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, the best observed storm by the CyMISS program was Hurricane Irma with a total of three image sequences acquired by the crew of the ISS on September 5th, 7th and finally on the 10th when the eye of the storm was passing over the Florida Keys.

December’s Image of the Month is a closeup 3D view of the eye of Hurricane Irma created using images from a sequence of 384 photographs taken by the crew of the ISS on September 5, 2017 in support of CyMISS. When the 6½-minute photography session started at 15:08 GMT, the eye of Hurricane Irma was located in the Atlantic Ocean at about 16.8° N, 58.4° E just to the east of the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands. At this time, Irma was rated as a powerful Category 5 storm with sustained surface winds of 290 kph (180 mph). The individual photographs from the original image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before they were stitched together into a synoptic color mosaic covering an area of about 2,800 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. Visible in the lower right side of the image is the northern coast of South America stretching from eastern Venezuela to French Guiana. In the lower left corner is the Dominican Republic with Puerto Rico just visible beneath one of the outer bands of the storm.

The Image of the Month is a 3D image created using a pair of close up views of the 45-kilometer eye of Hurricane Irma taken a few seconds apart around 15:11:19 GMT. 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 3D image, which can be viewed at full size by clicking on the image below, covers an area of 150 by 100 kilometers. In addition to Irma’s cloud top structure, this 3D view clearly reveals multiple layers of clouds inside of the well-defined, 45-kilometer eye illuminated by the high, mid-day Sun.

The goal of the ongoing CyMISS (Tropical Cy clone Intensity M easurements 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.

Follow Drew Ex Machina on Facebook.

Related Reading

See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.