Dissecting Hurricane Earl: Big Pics
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Sept. 2, 2010 -- Now matter how you look at them from afar, hurricanes are gorgeous. Above, the crew of the International Space Station snapped Hurricane Earl as it churned over the Atlantic Ocean on August 30 as a Category 4 storm.
After weakening slightly yesterday, Earl is back up to Category 4 status, packing sustained winds of 145 miles per hour as it bears down on the East Coast of the U.S..
Meanwhile, NASA scientists are working overtime to peer inside Earl and see what makes it tick. Below, an infrared image from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) aboard the Aqua satellite shows the temperatures of cloud tops in Earl. The coldest temperatures, shown in purple, indicate the highest clouds, and the heaviest rains at the surface.
A slice of Earl from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on the Terra satellite reveals the 3-D structure of the storm's winds.
Purple arrows show the direction and speed of low-level winds, below an altitude of about 2.5 miles, which are blowing in the typical counter-clockwise direction as the hurricane sucks in warm, moist air that is its source of power.
Up higher, the green and yellow arrows show winds blowing in the opposite direction as they move out over the top of the storm. The highest winds, shown in orange and red arrows, spill out from the churning eye wall.
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