Hurricane Humberto in 3-D

The folks who run NASA's TRMM Satellite have uploaded some great images and movies of Hurricane Humberto. None of these really answer the question: "Why did he intensify so quickly?" (see yesterday's entry) but they are interesting nonetheless. The first image is a 3-D shot of the storm, where higher cloud tops are shown in red.

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Note that some of the cloud tops extend to nearly 20 KM up (12 miles or over 63,000 feet!) Technically, that's the top of the 15dBZ rainfall (drizzle) so the clouds may extend a little higher. Although 12 miles sounds impressive, clouds at those heights are not unusual in severe thunderstorms or hurricanes. The colors in the southern quadrant of the image is a slice through the storm showing Radar** data from the TRMM, not to be confused with the cloud height towers. In the rainfall image below, I have added Inches to the scale for our U.S. viewers.

(Animation)*

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**The TRMM satellite, looking down from high above the earth, emulates a conventional ground radar system with its PR (Precipitation Radar) sensor.