As super Typhoon Bilis, equal in strength to a category 5
hurricane, bears down on Taiwan, images taken by two NASA
instruments on August 21, 2000, show the massive storm’s most
devastating components: rain and wind.
The images are available at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/typhoonbilis
Conventional satellite data provide imagery of the clouds at
the top of a storm. These images, however, were created by
combining data from two NASA instruments capable of looking
through a storm’s clouds and seeing what is going on at the
surface. These two instruments passed over the same location
about one hour apart.
The images show the surface winds, measured by SeaWinds on
QuikSCAT’s radar scatterometer. The wind data are superimposed on
rainfall measurements made by the microwave imager on the
Tropical Rain Measuring Mission satellite (TRMM).
QuikSCAT, launched in June 1999, and TRMM, launched 18
months earlier, provide scientists the opportunity to observe
both wind and rain before a storm makes landfall.
More information about SeaWinds is available at:
http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/quikindex.html
More information about TRMM is available at:
The SeaWinds on QuikSCAT project is managed for NASA’s Earth
Science Enterprise by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif. TRMM is a joint US/Japanese mission managed by NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
