Typhoon Violet at Japan

Typhoon Violet (109kbytes)

This image shows typhoon Violet, along with surrounding winds measured by the NSCAT scatterometer, near Japan on September 20, 1996. The cloud imagery is from the Infrared channel of the GMS-5 Japanese meteorological satellite. Overlayed on top of the cloud data are the surface vector winds as measured by NSCAT. In the NSCAT data, the measured wind direction is shown by arrows, and the measured speed by color: blue representing low wind speeds and red the highest wind speeds. An apparent drop in wind speed near the center of the storm is most likely due to access rain attenuation of the scatterometer radar signal. This image is typical of the operational data that was generated using NSCAT and made available to meteorologists. NSCAT provided regular measurements of ocean surface wind velocity from space, which enhanced the ability to forecast the behavior of storms such as Violet.