NASA’s AIRS Monitors Tropical Storm Fay as It Deluges the East Coast – Jet Propulsion Laboratory

From its vantage point aboard the Aqua satellite, the instrument maps how much moisture the storm’s clouds contain.
Tropical Storm Fay is sweeping across New England, with the
center of the storm making landfall about 10 miles (15 kilometers)
north-northeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, at around 5 p.m. local time. At
that time, Fay had maximum sustained winds of around 50 mph (85 kph).
Forecasters predicted the storm will dump up to 7 inches (18 centimeters) of
rain along its path from Delaware into New Jersey.
NASA’s Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) collected this
image at around 2 p.m. local time on Friday, July 10. The purple regions
indicate very cold clouds lofted high into the atmosphere by the storm and generally
linked to heavy rainfall. Warmer clouds closer to the ground show up as green
and blue, while the orange areas denote mostly cloud-free parts of the sky.
AIRS, together with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit
(AMSU), measures the infrared and microwave radiation emitted from Earth to
study the planet’s weather and climate. Both instruments observe Earth from
NASA’s Aqua satellite, which launched in 2002.
AIRS and AMSU work in tandem to make simultaneous observations down to
Earth’s surface, even in the presence of heavy clouds. With more than 2,000
channels sensing different regions of the atmosphere, the system creates a
global, three-dimensional map of atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud
amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations, and many other atmospheric
phenomena. The AIRS and AMSU instruments are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Southern California under contract with NASA. JPL is a division
of Caltech.
More information about AIRS can be found at:
https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
News Media Contact
Jane J. Lee / Ian J. O’NeillJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-354-0307 / [email protected] / [email protected]
2020-134

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