NASA and the Japanese Space Agency’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite flew over Ida and captured her rainfall when she passed by Nicaragua, Honduras and Belize this weekend. TRMM data revealed that most of the heaviest rainfall totals, as much as 11 inches, were just off the coasts of those countries, even though all of those areas dealt with flooding rains.

On November 6, 2009 at 1147 UTC (7:47 a.m. ET) TRMM revealed Ida had weakened to a tropical depression after coming ashore in eastern Nicaragua on November 5. TRMM identified the location of Ida’s center of circulation and noted that much of the very heavy rainfall that occurred earlier had tapered off except for a few intense thunderstorms off the northeastern Honduras coast.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida predicted that Ida would blossom again into a tropical storm after moving into the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Honduras. Ida did enter Gulf of Mexico as a tropical storm, strengthened to a Category One Hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, and as of 10 a.m. ET on Monday, November 9, Ida had weakened to a Tropical Storm.

Ida’s maximum sustained winds as of 10 a.m. ET on November 9 are now near 70 mph. Her center was located near 26.5N and 88.3W, and was moving north-northwest near 17 mph. Minimum central pressure is estimated near 996 millibars.

TRMM can be used to calibrate rainfall estimates from other satellites. The TRMM-based Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. monitors rainfall over the global Tropics. The TMPA rainfall analysis above shows that Ida produced heavy rainfall over large areas of eastern Nicaragua and Honduras. The highest rainfall totals of over 275 mm (~11 inches) were along the eastern Nicaragua coast as hurricane Ida came ashore.

People love to get the big picture of hurricane alleys, and thanks to the GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., they can now get real-time satellite animations of the eastern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

NASA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Project is offering real-time HDTV movies of the east- and west-coast “hurricane alley” regions. There are two types of movies for both the Eastern Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. There are “Coastal” and “Global” movies. The two coastal movies (one for each ocean) show four satellite image frames per hour over the previous two days. The two global movies show two frames per hour over the most recent three days. All four movies are automatically updated every hour.

“The color frames are composed by overlaying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) GOES cloud images on a true-color background previously derived from NASA’s Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imager,” said GOES Project Scientist Dennis Chesters on the NASA GOES Project at Goddard. MODIS is an instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites to provide color imagery of the Earth’s surface. “The GOES infrared images show the convective storms 24 hours a day. During daylight, the GOES visible images reveal the low clouds that provide detail and a sense of the low-level winds,” Chesters said.

Hurricanes develop far from land in wide areas of the sub-tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where only satellites can provide up-to-date weather data. NASA’s GOES Project has created a method to animate satellite imagery on a true-color map over that large area to watch the early development of hurricanes.

“These new live animations provide panoramic views of each hurricane alley in HDTV wide-screen format,” Chesters said. Viewers can see tropical cyclones in the Pacific developing off of the western Mexican or Central American coasts, potentially threatening Mexico or Hawaii. The Atlantic panorama revels the potential hurricanes that threaten the Caribbean islands and the USA’s eastern and gulf coasts, and also shows the constant flow of convective storms across the eastern United States.