3D View of Tropical Cyclone Debbie from the ISS – March 27, 2017

One of the precursor projects for Tropical Weather Analytics’ Hurricane Hunter Satellites was the CyMISS (Tropical Cyclone intensity Measurements from the ISS) project which ran from 2014 to 2019. Funded by a series of grants from CASIS (Center for the Advancement of Science in Space) which manages the ISS US National Laboratory for NASA, CyMISS was performed by the science team at Visidyne (the corporate antecedent of Tropical Weather Analytics) for NASA’s Tropical Cyclone Experiment as part of NASA’s CEO (Crew Earth Observations) activities on the International Space Station. The goal of CyMISS was to acquire image sequences of intense tropical cyclones (TCs), such as hurricanes and typhoons, from the ISS using a specially designed photography protocol (see “The Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS (CyMISS)”) to support the development of stereographic imaging techniques of these destructive storms. These techniques will allow the altitudes of the cloud tops near the eye of TCs to be precisely determined so that these TCs can be more accurately characterized compared to existing remote sensing methods (see “Using the Carnot Engine Model to Characterize Hurricanes from Orbit”). Because of how these stereo images are acquired, processed, and analyzed, the motion of cloud features can also be tracked to derive the winds in three dimensions including unique measurements of vertical winds – a vital input for accurately modelling the future track and intensity of TCs (see “The Impact of New Satellite Wind Measurements on Hurricane & Tropical Cyclone Forecasting”)

During the course of this five-year project, the CyMISS project science team (which is now the core of the TWA science team) amassed a large collection of storm images that we wish to share. One of the TCs observed in support of CyMISS by the crew of ISS Expedition 50 was Tropical Cyclone Debbie off the Pacific coast of Australia on March 27, 2017.

Our 3D view of Tropical Cyclone Debbie was created using images from a sequence of 240 photographs (like the sample above) taken by the crew of the ISS during an overpass on March 27, 2017 (see “ISS Daily Summary Report – 3/28/17”). When the four-minute photography session started at 07:10:00 GMT (5:10:00 PM AEST), the eye of Debbie was located at about 19.5° S, 150.1° E just 150 kilometers off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Tropical Cyclone Debbie had been intensifying steadily over the previous few days and had reached a strong Category 3 on the Australian tropical cyclone intensity scale (a strong Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale used in the US) with sustained winds of about 148 kph (92 mph). Debbie would continue to move to the southwest and hit its peak strength a few hours later with sustained winds of 176 kph (109 mph) but then weakened as it made landfall on Queensland’s Whitsunday coast at about 02:40 GMT (12:40 PM AEST) on March 28.

In order to create the anaglyphic 3D image (left eye red, right eye blue) shown below, the individual photographs from the original 240-image sequence were remapped to approximate an overhead view before various parts of the frames were stitched together into a synoptic 3D mosaic covering an area of approximately 1,700 by 1,100 kilometers. A high resolution version of this synoptic 3D mosaic with an image scale of about 660 meters/pixel can be viewed by clicking on the image below. The clouds of Tropical Cyclone Debbie stand noticeably above those not associated with the storm. It should also be noted that this southern hemisphere storm circulates clockwise – the opposite direction of storms in the northern hemisphere – due to the Coriolis effect.

Related Reading

Drew LePage, “The Hurricane Hunter Satellites”, Drew Ex Machina, May 15, 2022 [Post]

Drew LePage, “Using the Carnot Engine Model to Characterize Hurricanes from Orbit”, TWA Blog, July 23, 2022 [Post]

Drew LePage, “The Impact of New Satellite Wind Measurements on Hurricane & Tropical Cyclone Forecasting”, TWA Blog, January 15, 2023 [Post]

Paul Joss, “The Cyclone Intensity Measurements from the ISS (CyMISS)”, Space Station Research Explorer [Page]