TRMM Satellite Shows Wednesday's Violent Storms Reached Heights of Over 10.6 Miles

Posted on April 28, 2011

TRMM, a satellite managed by both NASA and the Japanese Space Agency, flew over severe thunderstorms that were spawning tornadoes over the eastern United States on 28 April 2011 at 0652 UTC (2:52 AM EDT).

Tornadoes associated with this extremely unstable weather spawned tornadoes that have killed hundreds of people. The 3-D image above used TRMM's Precipitation Radar (PR) data to show the structure of those storms seen by the satellite. This TRMM radar vertical cross section shows that some of these violent storms reached to incredible heights of almost 17 km (over 10.6 miles).

You can see an animated gif of the above image here. It will probably make you dizzy.


More from Science Space & Robots