These structural changes are less apparent in natural-color images, which primarily show the tops of clouds. “Structural changes in brightness temperature can help tell us whether a storm is intensifying or weakening,” said Patrick Duran, the mission’s deputy program applications lead at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. All are important to understanding how storms will evolve. Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and project scientist for TROPICS, explained that patterns observed in the brightness temperature data can indicate the location of rain bands, the intensity of convection, whether the storm has formed an eye, and how those structures are changing over time. Ice in the clouds is an indication of intense movement of heat and moisture (convection) in a storm, noted Will McCarty, program scientist for TROPICS and program manager for weather and atmospheric dynamics at NASA Headquarters. The colder the temperature, the more ice there is likely to be in a column of the atmosphere. Each scene shows brightness temperature that is, the intensity of radiation detectable at that channel frequency moving upward from the cloud layers and toward the satellites.Ĭold brightness temperatures (blue and white) represent radiation that has been scattered by ice particles in the storm clouds. The images in this animation were built from data collected by a single channel (205 gigahertz) that is sensitive to ice in the clouds. Each TROPICS CubeSat contains a microwave radiometer that collects data across 12 channels to detect temperatures, moisture, and precipitation around and within a storm. The cost-effective, milk carton-sized satellites were launched in May 2023 by Rocket Lab. TROPICS is a constellation of four identical CubeSats designed to observe tropical cyclones. “TROPICS will deliver vital information for forecasters, helping us all better prepare for hurricanes and tropical storms.” “As communities throughout the world are experiencing the growing impacts of increased extreme weather, it’s never been more important to get timely data to those who need it most to save livelihoods and lives,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. The images shown were curated from nearly two dozen images acquired by the satellites around this time. Nearby, Beatriz was developing into a tropical storm, visible in these images as the less-organized clouds closer to the coast.ĭata for the images in the animation (above) and series (below) were acquired by the TROPICS mission-short for Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats. This animation shows the evolution of the Hurricane Adrian’s clouds from the morning of June 28 to the afternoon of June 29. It was the first hurricane observed by NASA’s newest storm-watching satellites. But Adrian garnered attention for another reason, especially among scientists. The storm-Hurricane Adrian-steered northwest away from the coast and posed no threat to land. In the final week of June 2023, the season’s first Eastern Pacific hurricane spun off the coast of Mexico.
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