Keeping an Eye on Hurricane Isabel

By Melanie Engram

This September, while Hurricane Isabel advanceds toward United States' East Coast, many optical remote-sensing platforms imaged her spiraling swirl of cloud canopy. Scientists interested in ocean processes, however, turned to RADARSAT's C-band SAR instrument to probe beneath Isabel's cloud cover and observe the surface of the Atlantic Ocean directly beneath the hurricane's eye. ASF obtained RADARSAT-1 imagery during Hurricane Isabel in conjuction with the international Hurricane Watch program. SAR imagery of this dramatic meterological event is valuable to those studying correlations between wind and Bragg wave patterns on the surface of open water.

When Hurricane Isabel's path swung inland, ASF supported the Federal Emergency Management Agency and ASF scientists interested in flood monitoring with RADARSAT imagery of the eastern seaboard. Pre-flood SAR imagery was accessed from archives and used to establish nominal riverbeds and ocean levels. This pre-Isabel data was compared to SAR imagery obtained during and immediately after the hurricane's passage. Using this comparison of RADARSAT SAR data obtained by ASF, disaster-monitoring agencies were able to determine flooded areas in Pennsylvania and the degree of coastal innudation in the Chesapeake Bay area

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