GPM Captures Hurricane Matthew Over Haiti

  • Released Thursday, October 6th, 2016
  • Updated Friday, August 25th, 2023 at 12:07AM
  • ID: 4508

This animation starts with an overview of North America, Central America, and the Caribbean. As the camera slowly pushes in, Hurricane Matthew begins to form. By the morning of October 2nd, 2016 Matthew is a Category 4 Hurricane immediately south of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Time then slows down to see GPM's GPROF swath reveal ground precipitation from the hurricane. Now, with the camera closer in the view rotates to reveal a curtain of 3-dimensional radar data from GPM's DPR instrument. DPR shows the 3-D structure of the hurricane's precipitation rates. Areas in blue and purple are frozen precipitation, whereas areas in greens and reds are liquid precipitation. The data for October 2nd then fades away and the hurricane advances to October 3rd, stopping over Haiti. A new satellite pass of GPM GPROF ground precipitation is revealed, followed by a new curtain of 3-D DPR data.

On October 2nd and 3rd, 2016 NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core observatory satellite flew over Hurricane Matthew. The first pass shows Matthew immediately after it became a category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 mph on October 2nd, 2016. The second pass shows it over Haiti on October 3rd as it buffets Haiti with sustained winds of 140 mph.

The GPM Core Observatory carries two instruments that show the location and intensity of rain and snow, which defines a crucial part of the storm structure – and how it will behave. The GPM Microwave Imager sees through the tops of clouds to observe how much and where precipitation occurs, and the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar observes precise details of precipitation in 3-dimensions.

GPM data is part of the toolbox of satellite data used by forecasters and scientists to understand how storms behave. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Current and future data sets are available with free registration to users from NASA Goddard's Precipitation Processing Center website.

This visualization is the same as above except without colorbars and dates overlayed. (Useful for broadcasters who wish to organize the annotation layout differently.)

Color bar for frozen precipitation rates (ie, snow rates). Shades of cyan represent low amounts of frozen precipitation, whereas shades of purple represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for frozen precipitation rates (ie, snow rates). Shades of cyan represent low amounts of frozen precipitation, whereas shades of purple represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for liquid precipitation rates (ie, rain rates). Shades of green represent low amounts of liquid precipitation, whereas shades of red represent high amounts of precipitation.

Color bar for liquid precipitation rates (ie, rain rates). Shades of green represent low amounts of liquid precipitation, whereas shades of red represent high amounts of precipitation.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

Missions

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Series

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Datasets used in this visualization

GOES (Collected with the IR4 sensor)
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GPM Volumetric Precipitation data (A.K.A. Ku) (Collected with the DPR sensor)
Observed Data JAXA 10/02/2016 09:11:28 - 09:40:57Z, 10/03/2016 19:97:02 - 20:39:35Z

Credit: Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

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GPM Rain Rates (A.K.A. Surface Precipitation) (Collected with the GMI sensor)

Credit: Data provided by the joint NASA/JAXA GPM mission.

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