This season is proving to be a fairly busy one for hurricanes and typhoons in the northern hemisphere. September’s Image of the Month is of Typhoon Soulik created using images from a sequence of 240 photographs taken by the crew of the ISS on August 21, 2018 in support of the CyMISS (tropical Cyclone intensity Measurements from the ISS) project. When the four-minute photography session started at 22:20:16 GMT, Soulik was located at about 30.2° N, 128.0° E in the western Pacific and was still rated as a strong Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale with sustained winds of about 177 kph (110 mph). The individual photographs from the original 240-image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before they were stitched together into a synoptic color mosaic covering an area of 1,500 by 600 kilometers. A high-resolution version of this synoptic mosaic with an image scale of 500 meters/pixel can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
This synoptic image shows Typhoon Soulik as viewed from the ISS on August 21, 2018 at about 20:21 GMT. Covering an area of 1,500 by 600 km, this mosaic was created by remapping the original 240 color photographs taken by the crew of the ISS to approximate an overhead view before stitching them together. Click on the image to view a high-resolution version with a scale of 500 meters/pixel. (A.J. LePage/Visidyne/NASA-JSC)
The Image of the Month is a 3D image created using a pair of close up color views of the huge 50 by 100 kilometer eye of Typhoon Soulik taken five seconds apart around 22:20:48 GMT. These images were remapped to approximate an overhead view before being combined to create an anaglyphic 3D image (a pair of stereo glasses with a red filter over the left eye and a blue filter on the right is required to reproduce the 3D effect). The resulting stereo view, which can be seen at full size with a scale of 60 meters/pixel by clicking on the image below, covers an area of 225 by 150 kilometers and clearly reveals the structure in and around the complex eye of Soulik. In the days ahead, Typhoon Soulik would continue to weaken as it passed over Japan’s Ryukyu Islands then turned in the East China Sea to pass over South Korea.
This is a close-up anaglyphic 3D view (left eye red, right eye blue) of the eye of Typhoon Soulik as it appeared from the ISS at about 22:20:48 GMT on August 21, 2018. It was created by combining a pair of color images taken five seconds apart which had been processed to approximate a common overhead view covering an area of 225 by 150 kilometers. Click on the image to view the full-size version at a scale of 60 meters/pixel. (A.J. LePage/Visidyne/JSC-NASA)
The goal of the ongoing CyMISS (tropical Cyclone intensity Measurements from the ISS) project is to acquire image sequences of intense tropical cyclones (TCs), such as hurricanes, to support the development of an improved remote sensing method to determine more accurately the strength of these destructive storms using stereoscopy. 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 GA-2018-272.
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See earlier articles on the CyMISS program here.