Skylab 3 astronauts witnessed many spectacular sights during their 858 orbital trips around the Earth in the summer of 1973. One involved watching powerful Hurricane Ellen take shape off the West African coast. “There’s a nice storm down there. She looks pretty big. She’s got a lot of clouds,” said astronaut Alan L. Bean upon viewing the storm from Skylab’s low-Earth orbit.
Knowing they were witnessing something of interest to meteorologists on Earth, Bean and his fellow Skylab crew members captured stereo photographs of the storm using cameras aboard the space station. Meteorologists later used these images, which provided three-dimensional data, to help them understand how the clouds in tropical systems formed and functioned.
Like the Skylab 3 crew’s photographs of Hurricane Ellen, the lightning observations of Skylab 4 astronaut Edward G. Gibson were also used by meteorologists to understand regional weather phenomena. While gazing down at a storm over South America’s Andes Mountains, Gibson noted that the thunderstorm he observed generated recognizable lightning patterns over a 500-square-mile region.
“A few things impressed me here: one is the fact that they could go off simultaneously or near simultaneously over a large distance—sympathetic lightning bolts, if you will, analogous to sympathetic flares on the sun. And that we do get periods of calm between periods of very high activity. Some sort of collective phenomenon appears to be at work,” Gibson recalled.
The photographs of Hurricane Ellen and Gibson’s notes about lightning patterns are just two of many valuable meteorological observations and recordings astronauts made during Skylab’s three crewed missions. All told, astronaut-conducted Earth studies provided important regional, also known as mesoscale, weather data that improved storm forecasting.
Along with providing valuable data to meteorologists, the notable findings of the Skylab astronauts supported the argument of the era’s scientists and mission planners who insisted that there was no adequate replacement for intelligent human observers in space.
Perhaps the authors of Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab put it best when they wrote: “Man’s ability to discriminate, to select the important features of a wide vista, and to respond effectively to unexpected events constituted his greatest contribution to orbital investigations.”
