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 and typhoons, 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 storm images during the last four years that we wish to share. One of the TCs observed for CyMISS by the crew of the ISS in 2017 was the Pacific storm, Hurricane Eugene, off the Pacific coast of Mexico.

June’s Image of the Month is a 3D synoptic view of Hurricane Eugene created using images from a sequence of 335 photographs, like the one shown above, taken by the crew of the ISS during an overpass on July 10, 2017. When the 5½-minute photography session started at 17:23:00 GMT, Eugene was located at about 18.9° N, 117.4° W in the eastern Pacific Ocean well off the coast of Mexico. The weakening hurricane (which had peaked in strength at Category 3 about 24 hours earlier) was rated as a minimal Category 1 storm with sustained winds of about 130 kph (81 mph). Hurricane Eugene (and its weakening remains) stayed safely out to sea. A synoptic color view of the storm created using the image sequence remapped to approximate an overhead view with north towards the top of the frame is shown below.

In order to create the anaglyphic 3D image (left eye red, right eye blue), the individual photographs from the original image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before various parts of the frames were stitched together into a synoptic 3D mosaic covering an area of approximately 2,300 by 1,400 kilometers. These images were acquired using a 28 mm wide-angle lens instead of a normal 50 mm lens allowing wider stereo angles (in this case, ~20°) to be employed as well as providing a view closer to the ISS ground track than is typical in CyMISS imagery. The longer-than-normal photography session also allowed a much longer image swath revealing the development of lower-latitude, tropical weather systems to the southeast of Eugene. A high resolution version of this synoptic 3D mosaic with an image scale of 500 meters/pixel can be viewed by clicking on the image below. The Pacific coast of Baja California is visible to the upper left edge of the image.

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.