A Menacing Line of Hurricanes
- Written by:
- Jesse Allen,
- Joshua Stevens, and
- Adam P. Voiland
- View full credits
Forecasters were most concerned about Irma, which was on track to make landfall in densely populated South Florida on September 10 as a large category 4 storm. Meanwhile, category 2 Hurricane Katia was headed for Mexico, where it was expected to make landfall on September 9. And just days after Irma devastated the Leeward Islands, the chain of small Caribbean islands braced for another blow—this time from category 4 Hurricane Jose.
The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite captured the data for a mosaic of Katia, Irma, and Jose as they appeared in the early hours of September 8, 2017. The images were acquired by the VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light signals in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared, and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In this case, the clouds were lit by the nearly full Moon. The image is a composite, showing cloud imagery combined with data on city lights.
For More Information
See https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view_internal.php?id=90931
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Data visualizers
- Jesse Allen (SSAI) [Lead]
- Joshua Stevens (SSAI) [Lead]
Writer
- Adam P. Voiland (SSAI) [Lead]