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ShareAug. 24, 2000 — As super Typhoon Bilis, equal in strength to a category 5 hurricane, bears down on Taiwan, images taken by two NASA instruments on August 21, 2000, show the massive storm's most devastating components: rain and wind.
The images are available at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/typhoonbilis
Conventional satellite data provide imagery of the clouds at the top of a storm. These images, however, were created by combining data from two NASA instruments capable of looking through a storm's clouds and seeing what is going on at the surface. These two instruments passed over the same location about one hour apart.
The images show the surface winds, measured by SeaWinds on QuikSCAT's radar scatterometer. The wind data are superimposed on rainfall measurements made by the microwave imager on the Tropical Rain Measuring Mission satellite (TRMM).
QuikSCAT, launched in June 1999, and TRMM, launched 18 months earlier, provide scientists the opportunity to observe both wind and rain before a storm makes landfall.
More information about SeaWinds is available at:
http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/quikindex.html
More information about TRMM is available at:
The SeaWinds on QuikSCAT project is managed for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. TRMM is a joint US/Japanese mission managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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