Hurricane Helene’s winds surged in strength as the storm churned over unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and closed in on the Florida Panhandle and southern Georgia on September 26, 2024.
Hurricane Helene’s winds surged in strength as the storm churned over unusually warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and closed in on the Florida Panhandle and southern Georgia on September 26, 2024. When the deadly Category 4 storm struck Florida’s Big Bend area and then pushed north, winds in some areas exceeded 140 miles per hour (225 kilometers per hour)—strong enough to snap trees, tear the roofs off buildings, and topple power lines.
After the storm passed, millions of people across several states were left without electricity. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite has a low-light sensor, the day-night band, that measures nighttime light emissions and reflections. It captured views of some of those losses in hard-hit communities in Georgia, including Augusta (above), Savannah (below), and Valdosta (second pair below).
Scientists with the Black Marble Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Science Systems and Applications, Inc., and the University of Maryland, College Park, processed VIIRS data to show nighttime lights before and after Helene passed through the Southeast. Data from September 28 were compared to a pre-storm composite (August) and overlaid on landcover data collected by the Landsat 8 and 9 satellites. These three cities were not the only communities in Georgia that lost power. Regional data showing the extent of outages is available here. Images of western North Carolina are not available because that area was covered by clouds on September 28.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
