A low pressure system in the North Atlantic that evolved into hurricane-force storm last weekend brought gale force winds and high waves to the United Kingdom and Ireland Sunday and yesterday. On satellite imagery, the storm looks pretty dramatic, so I thought I'd share some of what I've found. The image above is a screenshot from a video showing the evolution of the storm. The false-color images comprising the video come from a Meteosat weather satellite. This particular remote sensing product is used to monitor the evolution of cyclones, in particular rapid cyclogenesis. Here's a description from the Ocean Prediction Center of the National Weather Service:
The low is shown intensifying east of Greenland, and the imagery indicates a stratospheric intrusion with the deep red and purple shading near the low center. This is a sign of strong winds aloft mixing down toward the surface. The system is then shown ...
