Figure 1
Hurricane Daniel intensified between July 18 and July 23rd. NASA's new
CloudSat satellite was able to capture and confirm this transformation in
its side-view images of Hurricane Daniel as seen in this series of images.
The top images in figure 1 are from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)
to give an idea of how the storm looked from the top. The bottom images
are from CloudSat.
The first CloudSat image was taken from NASA's CloudSat satellite on July
18 at approximately 5:25 p.m. EDT (21:25 UTC). The second image was taken
July 19th at approximately 5:40am EDT (0940 UTC). The third image was
taken on July 23rd around 650am EDT (1050 UTC).
The red and purple areas indicate large amounts of cloud water. The blue
areas along the top of the clouds indicates cloud ice, while the wavy blue
lines on the bottom center of the image from 18 July and 23 July indicate
intense rainfall. Notice that the solid line along the bottom of the
panels from 18 July and 23 July, which is the ground, disappears in these
areas of intense precipitation. It is likely that in the area the
precipitation rate exceeds 30mm/hr (1.18 inches/hour) based on previous
studies.
From one side of the storm to the other, on July 18, Daniel appeared to be
approximately 700 km. The scale from top to bottom is approximately 30 km,
so the clouds in this hurricane reach heights of about 20 km. On July 19,
Daniel appears to intensify and became more compact as its maximum
sustained winds increased from 75 to 90 mph. By 23 July, the winds had
intensified to greater than 100 mph.
The CloudSat images shown here will provide analysts and forecasters a
view of hurricanes and typhoons that has not been available before. The
cross-sections shown in the bottom panels provide a view of the internal
dynamics of these storms that gives us important information about the
intensity, rainfall rates, and internal temperature fields of these
storms, all of which will help forecasters better predict how the storms
will intensify or weaken, and what the potential impact might be from
rainfall and wind.
Quicklook Images can viewed at the CloudSat Data Processing Center.