MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91190.TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://jpl.nasa.gov
IMAGE ADVISORY
August 18, 2000
FIRE AND RAIN: NASA SATELLITE SEES SIGNS OF NATURE'S FURY
Forest fires rage in Montana while on the same day Hurricane
Hector swirls in the Pacific, and a NASA satellite is an
eyewitness to both. A pair of images is now on-line showing these
two unrelated, large-scale examples of nature's fury captured by
the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) during a single
orbit of NASA's Terra satellite on August 14, 2000. The images
are available at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/misr
In the left image, huge smoke plumes rise from devastating
wildfires in the Bitterroot Mountain Range near the Montana-Idaho
border. Flathead Lake is near the upper left, and the Great Salt
Lake is at the bottom right. Smoke accumulating in the canyons
and plains is also visible. This image was generated from the
MISR camera that looks forward at a steep angle (60 degrees); the
instrument has nine different cameras viewing Earth at different
angles. The smoke is far more visible when seen at this highly
oblique angle than it would be in a conventional, straight-
downward (nadir) view. The wide extent of the smoke is evident
from comparison with the image on the right, a view of Hurricane
Hector acquired from MISR's nadir-viewing camera. Both images
show an area of approximately 400 kilometers (250 miles) in width
and about 850 kilometers (530 miles) in length.
When this image of Hector was taken, the eastern Pacific tropical
cyclone was located approximately 1,100 kilometers (680 miles)
west of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. The eye is
faintly visible and measures 25 kilometers (16 miles) in
diameter. The storm was beginning to weaken, and 24 hours later
the National Weather Service downgraded Hector from a hurricane
to a tropical storm.
MISR, built and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is one
of several Earth-observing instruments aboard Terra, which was
launched in December 1999.
More information about MISR is available at:
http://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov .
JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena.
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