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« Hawking Says God Not Needed to Kick-Start Big Bang; World Freaks Out
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NASA’s Stunning Hurricane Pics Via Plane, Space Station & Satellite

<p>Yep, it's hurricane season. And while residents up and down the East Coast have been battening down the hatches in preparation for Hurricane Earl, NASA has used the opportunity to examine the storms from every angle.</p>
<p>Earlier this week <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/08/31/to-study-storms-nasa-flies-a-plane-into-hurricane-earl/" target="_blank">80beats reported</a> that NASA's Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) mission is sending a plane back and forth through the eye of Earl; researchers are gathering data to study how and why some storms turn into massive monsters while others dwindle away to nothing. This picture of Earl's eye was taken on Thursday morning while the plane was cruising at an altitude of 60,000 feet (11.4 miles up).</p>While East Coasters' attention has been fixed on the major storms forming over the Atlantic, the Pacific has its own crop of potential hurricanes. Lucikly NASA has been paying attention. <span class="detailImageDesc">This photo of Tropical Storm Frank in the Eastern Pacific Ocean was taken by a GRIP aircraft on Saturday, August 28 from an altitude of 60,000 feet.</span>A little higher, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station are getting a great view. The station's current altitude is about 220 miles high.These photos from the ISS were taken by an Expedition 24 crew member on Monday. They show Hurricane Earl (at this time a category 4 storm) as it passed just north of the Virgin Islands. <br />As <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/30/hurricane-double-whammy/">Bad Astronomy noted earlier</a>, NASA’s Terra satellite has captured images of the brewing storms. Terra's job is to gaze back at our planet from about 430 miles up, and to conduct studies of earth science and global warming.<br /><br />In this photo, taken on Sunday August 29, the larger storm is Hurricane Danielle, which has since fizzled out. The smaller storm is Earl, which grew in strength throughout the week. <br />By yesterday Earl looked truly daunting, reaching Category 4 status with winds of 145 miles per hour. But this morning (Friday) meteorologists declared that Earl had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane.<br /><br />This image was taken this morning by a weather satellite called GOES-13. It shows Earl (top) creeping up the coast, with the disorganized Tropical Storm Fiona following behind. Geostationary satellites like GOES-13 orbit at about 22,300 miles above the Earth.
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September 3rd, 2010 2:08 PM Tags: hurricanes, NASA, natural disasters
by Eliza Strickland in Environment, Photo Gallery | 8 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

8 Responses to “NASA’s Stunning Hurricane Pics Via Plane, Space Station & Satellite”

  1. 1.   REBECCA Says:
    September 4th, 2010 at 8:42 am

    Beautiful images! Thankyou for the different perspective!

  2. 2.   Lucky Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 4:30 am

    Interesting Images. thanks for the interesting information

  3. 3.   Benjamin Says:
    September 6th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    Awesome pictures, especially the last on from the goes-13 satellite

  4. 4.   savannah Says:
    October 14th, 2010 at 12:06 pm

    weird but cool

  5. 5.   Don Says:
    November 11th, 2010 at 12:33 pm

    I would have loved to have pix like these when teaching meterology to grade 11 students 30 years ago.

  6. 6.   Eugene Sittampalam Says:
    November 11th, 2010 at 10:00 pm

    “[R]esearchers are gathering data to study how and why some storms turn into massive monsters while others dwindle away to nothing.”

    Serious researchers here may want to down their blinkers awhile to see what could basically be causing some hurricanes to turn destructively “massive” when others could dwindle harmlessly away.
    As the English would say, we North Americans drive on the “wrong” side of the road. Unfortunately, this right-handed swirl of the atmospheric mass rising from our (two-way) highways could also feed and nourish our hurricanes. Though reversing this traffic flow on our highways could take a larger toll on lives in accidents, we will have to look at other avenues to nip hurricanes preferably in the bud. On that subject, a paper was submitted to Science, which, I hope, readers here would not find too impractical:
    http://www.sittampalam.net/HurricaneMitigation.pdf.
    Thank you all for your time, and Cheers!

  7. 7.   H. C. Pierce Says:
    November 18th, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    I would like to see the pictures of a plane that goes up to 60,000 feet to take some of these pictures. I’m impressed with that capability.

  8. 8.   Benedict Patteson Says:
    May 18th, 2011 at 7:23 am

    Abnormal this put up is totaly unrelated to what I was searching google for, however it used to be indexed about the initial page. I think your performing something right if Google likes you adequate to place you at the first internet page of the non similar search.

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