Over the past few days, hurricane Irene has grown as it
approaches the United States. The NASA/NOAA Earth-observing GOES
13 satellite has been keeping an eye on the storm, and images it
has taken have been put together into this dramatic video
showing Irene from August 23 at 10:40 UTC to 48 hours later…
just a few hours ago as I write this: Pay attention about 20
seconds into the video (August 23 at about 20:00 according to
the clock at the top of the video). You can see the eye wall
region burst into existence, and a few seconds later the eye
itself suddenly appears. Also, a surge of white clouds appears
to the right of the eye and wraps around the hurricane. That’s
where warm air has risen strongly, overshooting the cloud tops,
and producing intense rainfall (5 cm/hour according to TRMM!).
Overshooting tops, as they’re called, happen frequently in
tropical storms as they intensify. For what it’s worth,
something like that happens in stars as well as hot plasma rises
rapidly from under the surface, though as