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 in support of CyMISS by the crew of ISS Expedition 52 in 2017 was the powerful Pacific storm, Typhoon Noru.

July’s Image of the Month is a 3D synoptic view of Typhoon Noru created using images from a sequence of 240 photographs taken by the crew of the ISS during an overpass on August 1, 2017 as pictured above. When the four-minute photography session started at 07:25:00 GMT, Noru was located at about 24.1° N, 137.6° E in the western Pacific Ocean. Although Noru had strengthened rapidly during the last couple of days of July to peak at Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale making it a “Super Typhoon”, Noru had begun to weaken steadily during the day and a half before this session. At the time of the CyMISS photography session, Typhoon Noru had weakened to a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of about 185 kph (115 mph). In order to create this 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 1,350 by 900 kilometers. A high resolution version of this synoptic 3D mosaic with an image scale of ~700 meters/pixel can be viewed by clicking on the image below. The clouds of Typhoon Noru stand far above those not associated with the storm.

As can be seen in the wide area context image, the eye of Typhoon Noru presents a lot of interesting structure. A closeup 3D image was created using a pair of raw, 12-bit/color-plane images of the 60-kilometer eye of Typhoon Noru taken a few seconds apart around 07:26:44 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 and had their contrast stretched before being combined to create an anaglyphic 3D image. The resulting bonus 3D view, which can be viewed at full size of 100 meters/pixel by clicking on the image below, covers an area of 225 by 150 kilometers.

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.