The South Indian Ocean tropical cyclone season is nearing it's end but another tropical cyclone called ERROL has developed northwest of Australia. The TRMM satellite flew over ERROL when it was getting organized on 14 April 2011 at 1732 UTC. The image on the left above shows an analysis of rainfall using data from TRMM's Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) instruments. The light swath shows the locations of some heavy thunderstorms as TRMM's PR crossed over ERROL's center of circulation. The image on the upper right shows a 3-D image of these thunderstorms made from those radar

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite was placed into its low-earth orbit in November of 1997. Its primary mission has been to measure rainfall from space. TRMM has provided space borne rain radar and microwave radiometric data that measure the vertical and horizontal distribution of rainfall over the tropics. It has also been valuable for monitoring the development of tropical cyclones, especially over remote parts of the open ocean. The image on the right uses data captured by the TRMM satellite on 7 April 2011 at 1914 UTC. It shows a TRMM satellite view of rain intensity