Typhoon

Typhoon Soudelor's Rainfall Footprint Visualized

Tropical cyclones typically produce tremendous amounts of rain along their path regardless of how strong they are. Many times, weather data or imagery reveals the footprint of their heavy rainfall swath, which also shows the historical path of the tropical cyclone.

An image created by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center shows that Typhoon Soudelor was no exception. In the image, you can see the swath of Soudelor's tropical rains not only over land, but also over the Pacific Ocean Aug. 4-9, 2015. This period of time is just after Soudelor reached its peak intensity as a 180 mph super typhoon on Aug. 3, making it the strongest storm on earth so far this year.

(MORE: Stunning Satellite Images of Soudelor)

Map showing rainfall estimates from Typhoon Soudelor Aug 4-9, 2015. Orange and red shadings correspond to the heaviest amounts of rain.
(SSAI/NASA GSFC)

NASA uses data from satellites in space to help analyze how much rainfall is produced by storms such as Soudelor. It helps fill in the void for many data-sparse locations around the world such as oceans where we don't have weather observation stations that measure rainfall or ground-based radar systems that provide estimates.

For Soudelor, we also had ground-truth rainfall amounts from observation stations once it reached the Ryukyu Islands of southern Japan, Taiwan and eastern China. The mountainous terrain of Taiwan helped to enhance the rain produced by Soudelor, where one location in northeast Taiwan saw more than 52 inches of rain.

(MORE: Soudelor Recap)