With winds reaching 155 mph, this year's Hurricane Carlotta became the second
strongest eastern Pacific June hurricane on record. These images from MISR show
the hurricane on June 21, the day of its peak intensity. The pictures are oriented
so that the spacecraft's flight path is from left to right; north is at the left.
The top image is a color view from MISR's vertical (nadir) camera, showing
Carlotta's location in the eastern Pacific Ocean, about 500 km south of Puerto
Vallarta, Mexico.
The middle image is a stereoscopic "anaglyph" created using MISR's nadir camera
plus one of its aftward-viewing cameras, and shows a closer view of the area
around the hurricane. Viewing with red/blue glasses (red filter over the left eye)
is required to obtain a 3-D stereo effect.
Near the center of the storm, the eye is about 25 km in diameter and partially
obscured by a thin cloud. About 50 km to the left of the eye, the sharp drop-off
from high-level to low-level cloud gives a sense of the vertical extent of the
hidden eye wall. The low-level cloud is spiraling counterclockwise into the center
of the cyclone. It then rises in the vicinity of the eye wall and emerges with
a clockwise rotation at high altitude. Maximum surface winds are found near
the eye wall.
The bottom stereo image is a zoomed-in view of convective clouds in the
hurricane's spiral arms. The arms are breeding grounds for severe thunderstorms,
with associated heavy rain and flooding, frequent lightning, and tornadoes.
Thunderstorms rise in dramatic fashion to about the same altitude as the high
cloud near the hurricane's center, and are made up of individual cells that are
typically less than 20 km in diameter. This image shows a number of these cells,
some fairly isolated, and others connected together. Their three-dimensional
structure is clearly apparent in this stereo view.
Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/JPL, MISR Science Team
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