JPL developed, built and manages the NSCAT instrument for NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. The mission represents the first major collaboration in Earth remote sensing between the two nations. Data like these are being used by the National Weather Service, an agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in their global forecast models. NSCAT provides continuous measurements of ocean surface wind speeds and direction from space, which gives forecasters better information to predict the behavior of storms such as Violet and Tom. Strong winter storm activity is also shown in orange in the southern hemisphere. After these data were taken, Typhoon Violet struck the east coast of Japan, causing damage and deaths. The yellow- orange spiral features in the upper left near Japan are typhoons Violet and Tom. The white arrows show the direction of the wind. The background color indicates wind speed with blue being low winds, red is moderate winds, and yellow is high winds.

This image shows ocean surface wind speeds and directions over the Pacific Ocean on September 21, 1996, as they were measured by the NASA Scatterometer onboard Japan's Advanced Earth Observing Satellite. This 'first look' image is still uncalibrated, but images like this will be routinely available after completion of the calibration validation phase on the project's World Wide Web site at #

Nasa earth observatory