Space Station Flies Over Super Typhoon Maysak:

Space Station Flies Over Super Typhoon Maysak: Typhoon Maysak strengthened into a super typhoon on March 31, reaching Category 5 hurricane status on the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale. NASA Astronaut Terry Virts captured this image while flying over the weather system on board theInternational Space Station. Commenting on the storm, Virts wrote, "The eye of ‪#‎Maysak‬ typhoon really stands out early in the morning with the shadow being cast deep into the vortex." His ESA crewmate on station also viewed the storm and wrote, "Commands respect even from ‪#‎space‬: we just flew over typhoon #Maysak."

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellites captured rainfall and cloud data that revealed heavy rainfall and high thunderstorms in the strengthening storm.

Rain, snow, hail, ice, and every mix in between make up the precipitation that touches everyone on our planet. But precipitation doesn't fall equally in all places around the world, as seen in NASA's new animation that captures every shower, snowstorm and tropical cyclone over a six-day period in August 2014. The time lapse was created from data captured by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite mission, now just over a year old, which scientists are using to better understand freshwater resources, natural disasters, crop health and more.

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While local television forecasts include satellite data or radar images taken from a ground station, GPM orbits in space to observe precipitation around the world. A snapshot of the precipitation is taken every 30 minutes, then processed and made available to users 18 hours later. New rain maps are routinely created by programs that merge the data from the GPM Core Observatory, a joint mission of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and a dozen other weather satellites. These maps, called Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), are false-colored with rain in greens and reds, and snowfall depicted in blues and purples.

“For the first time, this global map allows us to track light rain and snow consistently over high latitudes and across oceans,” said Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

These views allow scientists and weather-watchers to get the big picture of a week in August. Near the equator the rain systems move westward in a steady stream. At higher latitudes, storm fronts that stretch for hundreds of miles travel eastward across North America and Europe in the Northern Hemisphere, and across the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica. It’s quiet between those bands. Zooming in on the IMERG data visualizations can also provide glimpses of the range of precipitation at a given time on Earth.