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Saturn's Cat 9 Hurricane
March 26, 2007Cassini took some fascinating video of a "hurricane-like" vortex located at Saturn's south pole. You can find a quicktime version here and an mpeg version here. NASA has an article here.
The storm has winds estimated at 350 miles per hour. Cloud heights are estimated at 20 to 45 miles, if I read that right, and the storm is about 5,000 miles across. When you study the imagery it's amazing how similar this is to a hurricane: you can see the storm "bands," an "eye-like feature" and even Floridians boarding up their homes.
Here's an image that was created from the video data that Cassini captured:
