The 2017 hurricane season still has a few days remaining, but it has already earned a place in the history books with 17 named storms, 10 hurricanes and six major hurricanes.
This video from NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office shows what the season looked like from space in vivid color.
Swirling African dust, sea salt and smoke all get wrapped up into the weather pattern of tropical cyclones, allowing you to see the invisible physical forces of the atmosphere at work.
Put it on full screen mode so you can read the hurricane names. It’s beautiful, like watching a tropical fish tank.
Sea salt, shown in blue, is picked up by winds passing over the ocean.
As tropical storms and hurricanes form, the salt particles are concentrated into the spiraling shape we all recognize.
With their movements, we can follow the formation of Hurricane Irma and see the dust from the Sahara, shown in tan, get washed out of the storm center by the rain.
Advances in computing speed allow scientists to include more details of these physical processes in their simulations of how the aerosols interact with the storm systems.
The increased resolution of the computer simulation is apparent in fine details like the hurricane bands spiraling counter-clockwise. Computer simulations let us see how different processes fit together and evolve as a system.