After causing widespread destruction on Puerto Rico, Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, Hurricane Jeanne was weakened to Tropical Storm status
for several days before it regained strength over the Bahamas as a Category
2 hurricane. When Jeanne made landfall in U.S. territory on September 26 it
was the fourth major hurricane of the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season to
strike Florida. These visualizations of Hurricane Jeanne on September 24
were captured by NASA's Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR). The
still panels include a natural color view from MISR's 26-degree
forward-viewing camera (left) and a two dimensional map of cloud-top
heights (right). In addition, a "multi-angle fly-over" is provided as an
animation using views from all nine MISR cameras.
The nine camera views which make up the animation have been processed to
give an approximate perspective view. The animation makes visible the
relative heights of clouds within the scene. Some of the real cloud
motion over the seven minutes during which all nine MISR cameras
observed the scene are also indicated by the animation. The cloud height
map was produced by automated computer recognition of the distinctive
spatial features between images acquired at different view angles.
Two-dimensional maps of cloud height such as these offer an opportunity
to compare simulated cloud fields against actual hurricane observations.
Results indicate that clouds within Jeanne had attained altitudes of
more than 16 kilometers above sea level. The height field pictured here
is uncorrected for the effects of cloud motion. Wind-corrected heights
have higher accuracy but sparser spatial coverage.
The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer observes the daylit Earth
continuously and every 9 days views the entire globe between 82° north and
82° south latitude. These data products were generated from a portion of the
imagery acquired during Terra orbit 25372. The still image panels cover an
area of about 400 kilometers x 884 kilometers, and utilize data from within
blocks 68 to 71 and within World Reference System-2 path 10.
MISR was built and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, CA, for NASA's Office of Earth Science, Washington, DC. The Terra
satellite is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technolog
