June 2, 2015

NASA satellites have been providing valuable data on hurricanes to scientists for decades. To mark the beginning of the 2015 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, NASA has released a new collection of scientific animations that look inside hurricanes to help explain what makes them tick using NASA satellite data.
The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through November 30. This year, the season began early with the development of Tropical Storm Ana in May. NASA's Hurricane page provided coverage of the storm from birth to death as it does daily with all tropical cyclones in every ocean basin around the world.
Satellites provide information such as cloud and sea surface temperatures, rainfall locations and rates of rainfall within each storm, cloud extent and even surface winds. All of that data is used to create daily hurricane updates and has been used in animations.
The 50-minute "Hurricane Resource Reel" is available online at the website for Scientific Visualization Studio of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The collection includes storms from various oceans around the world,; a look at the Atlantic Ocean's hurricane alley from NOAA's GOES-East satellite in September 2014, Hurricane Katrina, a Global Portrait of Precipitation, Superstorm Sandy, RapidScat looks at surface winds; and the upcoming Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS mission, set to launch in 2016.
The NASA hurricane website features a hurricane and typhoon resource page that includes a section for named storms between 1988-2007 including Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The gallery page also includes the following sections: hurricane resources; NASA/JAXA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite's 3-D hurricane products; narrated hurricane products and hurricanes sea surface temperature connections. There is also a gallery resource page for NASA/JAXA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. The gallery includes 3-D scans of recent storms like Hurricane Bertha and Super Typhoon Maysak and GPM's IMERG visualizations, beauty passes of the satellite and edited features.

Image: Still from the animation revealing a swath of GPM/GMI precipitation rates over Typhoon Hagupit in 2014.