A swirl of clouds over the Pacific
On May 22, 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of cloud vortices behind Isla Socorro, a volcanic island located in the Pacific Ocean. The island, which is located a few hundred kilometers off the west coast of Mexico and the southern tip of Baja California, is part of the Revillagigedo Archipelago.
Satellite sensors have spotted von Kármán vortices around the globe, including off of Guadalupe Island,near the coast of Chile, in the Greenland Sea, in the Arctic, and even next to a tropical storm.