This week's Texas storm towered 8 miles high
Once again, NASA offers us a brilliant perspective of Mother Nature’s fury!
The animation above shows us a 3-D view from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Satellite of the storms that hammered the Dallas area and eastern Texas.
Rainfall rates reached up to 2 inches per hour at times during the strongest storms, while those storms also spawned several tornadoes across the region. Some of these twisters were powerful enough to pick up entire big rig trucks.
The stronger the storms are, the taller they are. In an average shower or weak thunderstorm, cloud tops can reach around 30, 000 feet high. When they're more intense, severe cousins develop like those across eastern Texas. Those cloud tops can reach to heights of 50,000 to 60,000 feet, or about 10 miles high!
Tuesday’s storms towered over eastern Texas higher than about 8 miles, or around 42,000 feet. Even the storms that were developing across eastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi reached to heights of around 7 miles.
While we know several of these storms were tornadic as they passed across eastern Texas, these images cannot indicate whether storms are severe, and certainly not if they are producing tornadoes. We still need the traditional radar to see if a storm is rotating or to determine if it is severe. But what we can do is see the intensity of the precipitation underneath those storms and estimate the height of the cloud tops.
This TRMM satellite is part of a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. It orbits the globe about 16 times a day - about every 90 minutes. There are three instruments on this satellite, and the most innovative of those allows us to see these storms from a 3-D perspective. It's called the precipitation radar.
This instrument is what gives us a vertical profile of precipitation from the surface to a height of about 12 miles. It can detect precipitation as light as 0.7 millimeters per hour and can also detect frozen precipitation as the satellite orbits the Earth at about 250 miles above the surface.
TRMM is not just for looking at thunderstorms over land, but it's also a great tool for viewing tropical systems above open oceans.
Researchers do use other satellites to study tropical systems, but TRMM can provide a 3-D view of these storms and offer detailed information on the intensity and structure of precipitation in and around the eyewall, as well as the outer rainbands.
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Wow! Incredible photo of an giant storm!
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They should write these articles using metric units.
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That was a Texas Storm in Texas.
Music by the Byrds.
Wow- whata "brilliant" picture. Im sure its worth every cent of the cost to develop and launch the satelite that took it! Its amazingto think that with modern tech we can see the tops of clouds! lmao!
You're making fun but it's the science and technology that helps warns people and saves lives. There's nothing funny about that.
Eight miles high
And when you touch down
You'll find that it's
Stranger than known