Hurricane Emily

When NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) captured this image on July 13, 2005, Emily was just a few hours away from becoming a hurricane. The tropical storm was approaching Trinidad with winds of 95 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour or 50 knots) when this image was taken at 5:05 p.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time (21:05 UTC). The image reveals the structure of the storm, with wind speed shown in color and direction indicated by barbs. The white barbs indicate regions of heavy rain. Both the heaviest downpours and the strongest winds, shown in purple, are just east of the center of the storm. Compared to an image taken in the morning of July 13, this powerful section of the storm has expanded and moved closer to the center as Emily developed through the day.

Emily is the fifth tropical storm of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, and the second storm to reach hurricane status. By July 15, Emily reached Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson scale with winds of 205 km/hr (125 mph).

QuikScat Background
NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat) spacecraft was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on June 19, 1999. QuikScat carriesthe SeaWinds scatterometer, a specialized microwave radar that measures near-surface wind speed and direction under all weather and cloud conditions over the Earth's oceans. More information about the QuikScat mission and observations is available at http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov. QuikScat is managed for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, DC, by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. JPL also built the SeaWinds radar instrument and is providing ground science processing systems. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, managed development of the satellite, designed and built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, CO. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has contributed support to ground systems processing and related activities.