Tropical Cyclone Chapala is poised to make an unusual landfall on the Arabian Penisula over the weekend. The Suomi NPP VIIRS Day Night Band Imagery (courtesy William Straka, SSEC/CIMSS), above, from 2102 UTC on 29 October, shows a compact storm with curved bands of strong convection around an apparent eye.... Read More
GOES-15 (GOES-West) Infrared (10.7 µm) images (above; also available as an MP4 animation) displayed the formation of a ring of cold eyewall cloud-top IR brightness temperatures (in the -80 to -90º C range, violet colors) during the period of rapid intensification of Hurricane Patricia on 22 October 2015; the storm reached Category 5... Read More
Himawari-8 viewed Typhoon Champi in the North Pacific on 22 October 2015, as shown above. The storm was near peak intensity during this animation, as indicated by the graphs of satellite maximum wind speed and minimum surface pressure shown below (taken from this website). The eye (abnormally large for a Typhoon!)... Read More
A plot of the Advanced Dvorak Technique (ADT) intensity estimate for Hurricane Olaf (above) showed that the storm went through a period of rapid intensification during the 19-20 October 2015 period, reaching Category 4 strength. The National Hurricane Center noted that Olaf became the 6th major hurricane in the eastern North Pacific during... Read More
