You can use different metrics when determining 'top hurricane sat photos.' For instance, I agree Isabel, Mitch and Katrina are absolutely beautiful storms, but what about most intense-looking satellite presentation? As in, you wake up one morning and the latest advisory has it pegged at a record 868 mb... What kind of satellite presentation would make you believe that? I wouldn't believe Isabel, as an annular hurricane, could be anything close to that despite its 'beauty.' So here's a few babies that, in my opinion,
look like they could plausibly be the most powerful tropical cyclones:
![Image](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Typhoon_tip_peak.jpg)
Super Typhoon Tip. The eye, CDO and intense southwest banding are absolutely spectacular. This is actually just a little while after peak intensity; you can see traces of an ERC about to start. But still, if I saw this, I could believe this is the king of storms.
![Image](http://www.hurricanehistory.org/pictures/Hurrican-Gilbert1.jpg)
Hurricane Gilbert is my personal favourite in terms of satellite presentation. The size of the storm compared to the pinhole eye, and those swirling galaxy-like 'arms...'
![Image](https://www.ultimatechase.com/chase_accounts/Images/Hurricane_Wilma/Wilma_Infrared_Sat_Large_02.jpg)
Love its pinhole eye. To be honest, I don't think it looks as powerful as some of the others here, but maybe that's just me.
![Image](http://bbs.typhoon.gov.cn/attachment/Mon_0609/10_2832_9e1a505b98d0866.gif)
JTWC had Zeb at 872 mb. It's also noteworthy as it spawned another tropical storm in its vast inflow, and then absorbed it. Looks somewhat like Gilbert, with its vast size yet small eye, and pinwheeling bands. The outflow to the southwest is just insane.
![Image](http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/wnp/by-name/199230/1/512x512/GMS492112100.199230.jpg)
That outflow... If Gay had happened earlier in the season when ambient pressures were lower, I'd be very confident in supporting the satellite estimates for it being stronger than Tip.
![Image](http://www.cyclonextreme.com/Images/Monde2006/PhotoMonicanb.jpg)
Incredibly symmetrical, and definitely beautiful. Generally, I associate small, if not pinhole, eyes and intense, distinct banding features with sub-890mb storms, but Monica nonetheless looks so perfect I do think its satellite presentation could match a Tip-rivalling storm.
![Image](http://oceansjsu.com/images/mn_cimaron3211_400.gif)
This is probably the weakest of the lot, at a 'mere' 140 knots (although I'm sympathetic to a 150-155 knot estimate). So maybe this is just personal preference in satellite presentation, but I do think it
looks exceptionally, Tip-rivalling intense.
![Image](http://www.newrepublic.com/sites/default/files/u166505/haiyan.png)
Who can forget Haiyan? In my opinion, Haiyan looks better on infrared than visual, but I've never seen a CDO quite like Haiyan's with such cold cloudtops, and if somebody woke me up and said recon got a sub-870 fix on a hurricane in the Caribbean and it looked like this, I could believe them. I also love its shape, with a very intense feeder band to the west heralding its arrival.
I wish I had better satellite images of Super Typhoon June (which was more intense than Tip IMO), or even satellite images at all of the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, given that I've never seen an Iris-sized micromonster with 892 (or perhaps lower) pressures and would be very curious what that'd look like on satellite, but there you go!
You know you're a hurricane nut, when your main source of adrenaline is reading old hurricane advisories...