Living in Switzerland you don’t get to experience many weather phenomena as dramatic as hurricanes and tornados. However, a former colleague of mine investigates the movement patterns of hurricanes to find similarities between individual storms. And in 2004, I was professionally dealing with hurricane Ivan. Ivan was a Category 5 hurricane and is, apparently, the 10th most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Back then we ordered a Quickbird image (and were lucky enough to get one without too much cloud coverage) and did both a qualitative and quantitative damage assessment of Grand Cayman Island.
These have so far been my only exposures to the study of extreme weather events and, specifically, to the analysis of storm-induced damage captured by means of remote sensing. But some days ago NASA’s Earth Observatory has released a stunning image of a tornado track (of one of the several tornados which have struck Massachusetts in early June 2011) that is well visible from space. Head past the break for the image and more info.
Continue reading “Path of destruction of tornado visible from space”