Viewing Fury From Space: USU Instrument on ISS Records Helene's Collision With Florida Coast

A myriad of satellites tracks hurricanes as they form, strengthen and menacingly approach land. These technological marvels provide critical warnings to human communities, allowing people to batten down the hatches, gather critical survival supplies and flee ahead of devastating winds, rain and floods.

But a novel NASA-funded instrument, designed and crafted by Space Dynamics Laboratory, launched to the International Space Station in November 2023 and strapped to the station’s belly, captured a new and startling, first-ever glimpse of a category 4 hurricane’s intense power. Utah State University physicists, who are monitoring data captured by the Atmospheric Wave Experiment (AWE) mapper, report enormous waves of energy that emanated upward into the outer layers of Earth’s atmosphere as Hurricane Helene slammed into the Florida coast on Sept. 26, 2024.

“The images are spectacular,” reports USU physics professor Ludger Scherliess, principal investigator for the AWE mission. “Like rings of water spreading from a drop in a pond, circular waves from Helene are seen billowing westward from the area of the hurricane’s impact on Florida northwest coast.”

Such data isn’t designed for hurricane forecasting on Earth, Scherliess says, but it will offer scientists new knowledge about how weather disturbances originating on our planet emanate into the atmosphere and cause disturbances in space.

“Space weather impacts us just as weather on Earth impacts us, but in different ways,” Scherliess says. “Disturbances in the Earth’s upper atmosphere can interfere with communications and navigation systems on which we all depend. Space weather can also affect space vehicles, including the ISS.”

The USU AWE Science Mission team is working toward release of the first data transmitted from the AWE space instrument, known as the Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (AMTM), that has been collecting data from its ISS perch since the tuba-sized instrument’s Nov. 2023 launch.

“Our team is working on providing accurate data analysis of the collected images of the waves for public access,” he says. “Reflections from clouds and the ground can obscure some of the images, and we want to make sure the data provide clear, precise images of the power transported by these waves. We also need to make sure the images coming from the four separate AWE telescopes on the mapper are aligned correctly and stray light from reflections coming off the solar panels of the ISS, along with moonlight and city lights, are not masking the observations. This process, which has never been done before, takes time.”

In the meantime, the scientists applaud the instrument’s output and are encouraged and excited about the images the AWE mapper is making available.

“Having this first-time, global view from space of the transport of energy by atmospheric gravity waves in the outer regions of our atmosphere is a scientific breakthrough,” Scherliess says. “We’re rapidly gaining access to knowledge that, previously, we could only attempt to get through ground-based instruments. This new, space-based mission opens a whole new chapter of knowledge.”

To learn more about the science data captured from AWE, visit the AWE Science Team’s website.