Hurricane Arthur

Hurricane Arthur skirting the east coast of the United States. Photographed from the International Space Station and shared by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on Twitter.

Alexander Gerst is currently a member of the resident International Space Station Expedition 40 crew. He is spending five and a half months living and working on the ISS for his Blue Dot mission.

Photo credit: ESA/NASA

Hurricane Amanda

Amanda, the first named storm of the 2014 hurricane season in the Americas, is seen off the west coast of Mexico in an image acquired on May 25 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. At the time of the image, Amanda was a category 4 hurricane. Amanda's winds peaked at 155 miles (250 kilometers) per hour, making it the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific. In the image, Hurricane Amanda sports a distinct eye as well as heavy rain bands wound tightly around the center.

Image credit: NASA/GFSC

Damage to Tacloban City, Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan

When Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded on Earth, struck the Philippines November 8, 2013, it tore a wide swath of destruction across large parts of the island nation. To assist in the disaster response efforts, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency, generated this image of the storm's hardest-hit regions, depicting its destruction.

The 40-by-50 kilometer damage proxy map, which covers a region near Tacloban City, where the massive storm made landfall, was processed by JPL's Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team using X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar data from the Italian Space Agency's COSMO-SkyMed satellite constellation. The technique uses a prototype algorithm to rapidly detect surface changes caused by natural or human-produced damage. The assessment technique is most sensitive to destruction of the built environment. When the radar images areas with little to no destruction, its image pixels are transparent. Increased opacity of the radar image pixels reflects damage, with areas in red reflecting the heaviest damage to cities and towns in the storm's path. The time span of the data for the change is August 19--November 11, 2013. Each pixel in the damage proxy map is about 30 meters across.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI

Note: For more information, see PIA17700: NASA Spacecraft Shows Before/After of Typhoon Haiyan's Devastation, NASA Damage Map Helps in Typhoon Disaster Response and NASA Peers Into One of Earth's Strongest Storms Ever.

Typhoon Soulik

The swirling eye of Typhoon Soulik as it approached Taiwan last Friday is caught by a tiny espresso cup-sized camera on one of ESA’s smallest satellites, Proba-2. This X-Cam image of Typhoon Soulik was acquired on 12 July at 10:14 GMT. Less than a cubic meter in size, Proba-2 focuses on observing solar activity and space weather. But it also keeps a small eye on its homeworld. Among the 17 experimental technologies hosted on Proba-2 is the compact Exploration Camera, X-Cam. Housed on the underside of the satellite, the monochrome X-Cam observes in the visible and infrared with a 100° field of view.

Photo credit: ESA