Radar satellite reveals guts of hurricane Sandy

Michael Marshall, environment reporter

(Image: Owen Kelley/TRMM/NASA)

It may look like an accident with some Play-Doh, but this is actually the interior structure of hurricane Sandy.

The image was taken on Sunday, the day before Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, by the radar on NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite. It reveals that Sandy had a distinctive eyewall, surrounding the relatively calm eye at the centre of the storm.

That marks Sandy out as an unusually powerful storm. Normally, hurricanes develop eyewalls only if they are category 3 or above. Sandy is just a category 1, the weakest kind of hurricane, but having merged with other weather systems it is much stronger than normal category 1 storms.

So far Sandy has claimed 16 lives in the US and caused widespread devastation. Sixty-nine are believed dead in the Caribbean.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/250a5858/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C10A0Cradar0Esandy0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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