Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Cuba early Thursday Oct. 25, 2012 as strong Category 2. Credit: NOAA/National Hurricane Center
Meteorologists keeping an eye on Hurricane Sandy say the storm threatens to move up along the east coast of the United States and could mix with a wintery storm coming from the west to form a monster storm that has been informally dubbed “Frankenstorm.” The hurricane could reach the US coast by this weekend and when the two storms collide, it could continue to pound the eastern seaboard well into the week of Halloween.
Hurricane Sandy is now in the Caribbean as a Category 2 storm coastal areas from Florida to Maine will feel some effects, forecasters predict. The mix of the two storms could cause weather problems in the Washington DC area to New York city, some of the most populous areas of the US.
Satellite image of then Tropical Storm Sandy taken on October 23, 2012 as it was over the Caribbean Sea taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.
Forecasters are saying this could be a major mess, with a 90 percent chance that the East will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain, flooding and maybe snow.
While no one can positively predict what Hurricane Sandy will do and how the two storms might mesh into one monster storm, the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang has outlined the possible scenarios from worst case to where the storms collide and remained parked over the region for days, to best case, where Sandy heads to the northeast sparing the East Coast from a direct hit.
We’ll post additional updated satellite views as they become available.
The Shiveluch volcano as seen by the Aqua satellite on October 6, 2012. Credit: NASA
It’s almost like this volcano has an on/off switch. The Shiveluch Volcano in the northern Russian peninsula of Kamchatka had been quiet, and an earlier image taken by NASA’s Terra satellite (below) at about noon local time (00:00 UTC) on October 6, 2012, showed a quiet volcano with no activity. But just two hours later when the Aqua satellite passed over the area, the volcano had erupted and sent a plume of ash over about 90 kilometers (55 miles). Later, a local volcanic emergency response team reported that the ash plume from Shiveluch reached an altitude of 3 kilometers (9,800 feet) above sea level, and had traveled some 220 kilometers (140 miles) from the volcano summit.
The same volcano seen by the Terra satellite just two hours earlier on the same day. Credit: NASA
Shiveluch is one the biggest and most active volcanoes in this region and rises 3,283 meters (10,771 feet) above sea level. NASA’s Earth Observatory website says Shiveluch is a stratovolcano composed of alternating layers of hardened lava, compacted ash, and rocks ejected by previous eruptions. It has had numerous eruptions the past 200 years, but has been active during much of its life – estimates are the volcano is 60,000 to 70,000 years old.
The beige-colored expanse of rock on the volcano’s southern slopes (visible in both images) is due to an explosive eruption that occurred in 1964. Another eruption started in 1999 and lasted for over 10 years.
This visible image of Tropical Storm Isaac taken from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite shows the huge extent of the storm, where the eastern-most clouds lie over the Carolinas and the western-most clouds are brushing east Texas. The image was captured on Tuesday, Aug. 28, 2012 at 10:25 a.m. EDT. Image Credit: NASA GOES Project
As expected Tropical Storm Isaac has now become a full-fledged hurricane, after being fed by the warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The slow moving storm is now closing in on the Louisiana-Mississippi coast and could make landfall in the region seven years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated the same area. It is not expected to be another Katrina, but with the slowness of the storm — about 16 km/h (10 mph) — forecasters are predicting 7-14 inches of rainfall across the coast as well as inland regions, and some places could even see 20 inches. Flooding from rainfall and storm surges are expected, according to NOAA. Satellites have been keeping an eye on the storm, and above is an image from one of the GOES satellites taken on Tuesday, August 28. Below are more satellite views.
The Proba-2 satellite’s X-Cam – Exploration Camera – acquired this image at 11:38:33 GMT on August 27, 2012. Credit: ESA
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image of Isaac over the Gulf of Mexico at 2:00 p.m. CDT on August 27, 2012. Credit: NASA
“If you could see the Earth illuminated when you were in a place as dark as night, it would look to you more spendid than the Moon.”
— Galileo Galilei.
400 years ago, Galileo could only imagine what the view of Earth would be like from space. Today, we have people on board the International Space Station who see that view every day. This new beautiful time-lapse shows aurora, lightning, our Milky Way Galaxy, city lights and other sights as seen from orbit.
Below is a great still image from this video, an amazing look through the ISS’s Cupola as Earth whizzes by:
Image caption: A view out the Cupola of the ISS. Credit: NASA
Europe’s latest geostationary weather satellite has captured its first image of Earth, and it’s a beauty! The Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) instrument on the Meteosat Second Generation-3 (MSG-3) satellite was launched on July 5, 2012, and has since been in the commission stage. ESA says it will still be a couple of months before it is ready for operations.
SEVIRI provides enhanced weather coverage for Europe and Africa in order to improve very short range forecasts, in particular for rapidly developing thunder storms or fog. It scans Earth’s surface and atmosphere every 15 minutes in 12 different wavelengths, to track cloud development. SEVIRI can pick out features as small as a kilometer across in the visible bands, and three kilometers in the infrared.
MSG-3 is the third in a series of four satellites. In addition to its weather-watching mission and collection of climate records, MSG-3 has two secondary payloads.
The Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget sensor measures both the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space and the infrared energy radiated by the Earth system, to better understand climate processes.
A Search & Rescue transponder will turn the satellite into a relay for distress signals from emergency beacons.
You can see a high resolution version of the image from ESA here.
The Whitewater-Baldy fire is the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history and has charred more than 465 square miles of the Gila National Forest since it started back on May 16, 2012 after several lightning strikes in the area. This wildfire produced so much smoke that it was visible even at night to the astronaut photographers on the International Space Station. This image was taken on June 2, 2012 by the crew of Expedition 31 on the ISS, with a Nikon D3S digital camera. A Russian spacecraft docked to the station is visible on the left side of the image.
The powerful windstorms that swept across the US last week was captured by several different satellites. This type of storm, called a derecho, moved from Illinois to the Mid-Atlantic states on June 29, and the movie from NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite shows the storms’ sudden expansion and speed. The storms left a more than 1,000-km (700-mile) trail of destruction across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic, cutting power to millions and killing thirteen people.
A derecho (pronounced “deh-REY-cho”) is not your average, ordinary local summer thunderstorm. These are widespread, long-lived but rare wind storms that are usually associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Damage from a derecho is usually in one direction along a relatively straight track. By definition an event is classified a derecho if the wind damage swath extends more than 400 km (240 miles) and includes wind gusts of at least 93 km/h (58 mph) or greater along most of its length.
These storms occur in the United States during the late spring and summer, with more than three quarters occurring between April and August.
The movie begins on June 28 at 15:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EDT) and ends on June 30, 2012 at 16:01 UTC (12:01 p.m. EDT). In the animation, the derecho’s clouds appear as a line in the upper Midwest on June 29 at 14:32. By 16:02 UTC, they appear as a rounded area south of Lake Michigan. By 21:32, the area of the derecho’s clouds were near Lake Erie and over Ohio expanding as the system track southeast. By 06:30 UTC, the size appears to have almost doubled as the derecho moves over West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. At 02:32 UTC on June 30 (10:32 p.m. EDT), the Derecho was over the mid-Atlantic bringing a 160 km (100 mile) line of severe storms and wind gusts as high as 144 km/h (90 mph) to the region.
“It is interesting how the process is a self-sustaining process that is fed by a combination of atmospheric factors that all have to be in place at the same time,” said Joe Witte, a meteorologist in Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, Va. and a consultant to NASA. “That is why they are relatively rare: not all the elements line up that often.”
NASA’s Aqua satellite flew over the derecho on June 29 and June 30, using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument (AIRS) onboard to capture infrared imagery of the event, as seen above.
“The AIRS infrared image shows the high near-surface atmospheric temperatures blanketing the South and Midwestern U.S., approaching 98 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Ed Olsen of the AIRS Team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The AIRS images for June 30 show areas of intense convection centered off the New Jersey coast and another, less intense, system over Iowa-Indiana-Ohio. The area off the New Jersey coast is no longer a rapidly moving linear front. The near-surface atmospheric temperatures over the South and Midwest had decreased by 10 to 15 Fahrenheit in most areas,” Olsen said.
NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (NPP) captured night-time images on June 28 and June 30, that reflected the massive blackouts that occurred after the derecho swept through the mid-Atlantic states. You can see the comparison images here at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.
The mechanics of a derecho go like this: The downburst mentioned by Witte, above, occurs when cold air in the upper atmosphere is cooled more by the evaporation of some of the rain and melting of the frozen precipitation pushed up into the high levels of the towering cumulonimbus (thunderclouds). That cold air becomes much denser than the surrounding air and literally falls to the ground, accelerating like any other falling body.
“The huge blob of very cold air from the upper atmosphere has a higher forward wind speed since it is high in the atmosphere,” Witte said. “This gives the ‘blob’ great forward momentum. Add that speed to the falling speed and the result is a very powerful forward moving surface wind.”
The process of a derecho can become self-sustaining as hot and humid air is forced upward by the gust front and develops more (reinforcing) towering clouds. If there is a rear low level jet stream, there is nothing to stop the repeating process.
The latest views of Earth from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites are looking a bit hazy from wildfires burning in wilderness areas of the United States and Siberia.
The above image acquired July 18 from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, aboard the Terra satellite, shows a whopping 198 wildfires burning across Siberia. You can view more of this huge fire at NASA’s Earth Observatory website. The fires have charred an area of more than 83 square kilometers. Some of the fires were started by people who lost control of agricultural fires but some fires were started by lightning.
Another NASA earth-observing satellite, Aqua, has taken dramatic images of the High Park Fire just west of Fort Collins, Colorado and the Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire in southwestern New Mexico. The High Park Fire has grown to more than 235 square kilometers, burning 180 structures and leading to the death of one person. It has become one of the most destructive and largest fires in Colorado history. Thankfully, the
Besides measuring the smoke plume and fire extent, much can be learned using satellite images of wildfires. Types of vegetation can affect the type and color of smoke emitted by the wildfire. Grassland fires tend to burn quickly and give off carbon-rich black smoke. Forest fires where moisture is higher give off thicker smoke; a combination of organic rich ash and water vapor, that ranges in color from brown to bright white.
On the plus side for weather buffs, each of the fires have produced rare pyrocumulus, or fire clouds. Wildfires and volcanos can produce these dramatic clouds as intense heating causes the air to rise. As the rising air cools, water vapor in the ash cloud condenses just like a normal cloud. The ash particles provide nuclei for water to condense. Sometimes this moisture will fall back on the fire as rain. Dave Lipson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the Denver Post that calm and clear weather along Colorado’s Front Range made the towering pyrocumulus cloud look especially menacing Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon, the lone fire cloud could be seen from 40 miles away from Denver.
Lead image caption: NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response. Instrument: Terra – MODIS
Second image caption: High Park Fire, Colorado from NASA’s Aqua MODIS
Third image caption: Looking north near Boulder, Colorado at the pyrocumulus cloud produced from the High Park Fire. Photo: John Williams
If a portion of Earth underwent a major cataclysm, how long would it take for life to recover? The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens is giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to witness a recovery from devastation, as the eruption leveled the surrounding forest, blasted away hundreds of meters of the mountain’s summit, and claimed 57 human lives. Landsat satellites have tracked the what has happened on the mountain, and how the forest was reclaimed — all on its own. This video shows a timelapse of the recovery, with annual images from 1979-2011 from the Landsat satellites, which acquired the images seen here between 1979 and 2011. Continue reading “Watch How Life Recovers from Devastation”
We’ve shared the images and a previous timelapse of Earth’s northern hemisphere, but now here’s a breath-taking timelapse of the entire blue (and green!) marble as seen from Russia’s Elektro-L weather-forecasting satellite, orbiting at a geostationary height of about 36,000 km (22,300 miles). This new video was created by James Drake using some of the largest whole disk images of our planet, as each image is 121 megapixels, and the resolution is 1 kilometer per pixel. The satellite’s wide-angle Multichannel Scanning Unit (MSU) takes images every 15-30 minutes, showing the same viewpoint of Earth across progressive times of the day and the images are in four different wavelengths of light — three visible, and one infrared.
