Hurricane Ian, September 28, 2022.
< period class ="glossaryLink" aria-describedby ="tt" data-cmtooltip ="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>NASA</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity." Its core values are "safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion."</div>" data-gt-translate-attributes="[{" attribute="">NASA scientists are studying the latest satellite imagery of Hurricane Ian and analyzing the forces that made the storm so catastrophic.
As Hurricane Ian headed toward a third landfall, this time in South Carolina, NASA scientists were scrutinizing the latest imagery of the storm and analyzing the forces that made it so catastrophic.
On September 28, the Landsat 8 satellite passed directly over Ian’s eye as the storm approached southwest Florida. The natural-color image above was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) at 11:57 a.m. local time (15:57 Universal Time), which was three hours before the storm made landfall in Caya Costa.
An eyewall is an organized band or ring of cumulonimbus clouds that surround the eye, or light-wind center of a tropical cyclone. Another name for eyewall is wall cloud.
The circular zone of fair weather at the storm’s center is known as the eye of a hurricane. It is surrounded by a towering ring of incredibly powerful thunderstorms called an eyewall, the part of the hurricane with the strongest winds. The swirling clouds along the edges of the eyewall are mesovortices. These are small-scale rotational features found in hurricanes with exceptionally strong winds.
According to the National Hurricane Center, when Ian’s eyewall crashed into Florida, its maximum sustained winds were 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour. That is the equivalent of a category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale. It is also fast enough to tear the roofs off homes and snap power lines.
“Those breathtaking low-level cloud swirls in Ian’s eye might provide clues into some important processes that affect a hurricane’s intensity,” said Justin Whitaker. He is a researcher with NASA’s Short-term Prediction Research and Transition Center (SPoRT). The SPoRT team, based at Marshall Space Flight Center, focuses on improving weather forecasts using NASA data. “At SPoRT, we’re studying how these inner-core asymmetries can affect a hurricane’s structure, its potential to intensify, and whether lightning will occur within the storm’s eyewall.”
The animation above illustrates the advancement of Ian’s wind field in between September 25–29,2022 The greatest winds appear intense yellow; more moderate winds are tones of orange and intense purple. Atmospheric information have actually been gone through NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model (GEOS), an information assimilation design that researchers utilize to evaluate international weather condition phenomena. The GEOS design consumes wind information from more than 30 sources, consisting of ships, radiosondes, buoys, dropsondes, satellites, and airplane. The design output is spaced out on a 0.25 to 0.3 degree grid, so it does not always catch peak gusts as determined by specific instruments on the surface area.
As Hurricane Ian barreled past Cuba and entered the Gulf of Mexico on September 27, the eye was around 12 miles (20 kilometers) broad. As the storm churned to the northeast, satellites observed a 2nd, bigger eye forming around and eventually enveloping the initial eye. This is a procedure called an eyewall replacement cycle. Eyewall replacement cycles prevail in strong cyclones, usually triggering the wind field to expand over a bigger location.
“An eyewall replacement cycle occurs when a hurricane develops concentric eyewalls and the inner eyewall collapses,” described CharlesHelms He is a climatic researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space FlightCenter “As a result, a hurricane’s eye grows much larger, and these cycles are often associated with a temporary pause in intensification. There is still much we do not understand about these cycles, and it remains an active topic of research in the tropical community.”
In Ian’s case, the eyewall replacement cycle triggered the eye to broaden to a width of 34 miles (55 kilometers), triggering the eyewall to broaden also. As some typhoon professionals have noted, this suggested that the whole degree of Charley’s hurricane-force winds would have fit inside Ian’s eye. (Hurricane Charley was a compact classification 4 storm that struck the very same part of Florida in 2004.)
“While Hurricane Charley had a similar intensity to Hurricane Ian and caused considerable damage to the immediate region as well as across central Florida, Charley was relatively small and fast moving,” statedHelms “Hurricane Ian was considerably larger than Hurricane Charley and moved much slower. This means that structures were subjected to high winds and storm surge for considerably longer during Ian than during Charley.”
By the time OLI got the image, Ian’s eye had actually diminished to 26 miles (42 kilometers) as the storm went through another duration of enhancing, winding up simply short of Category 5 strength prior to making landfall. The strength of the winds and plus size of the wind field assisted the storm push what showed to be a devastating storm rise into seaside neighborhoods, consisting of Cape Coral and FortMyers According to brand-new reports, winds and floods have actually ruined or harmed great deals of houses and knocked out power to millions.
NASA Earth Observatory image and video by Joshua Stevens, utilizing Landsat information from the U.S. Geological Survey, GEOS-5 information from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC, and roadways from OpenStreetMap.
