You’ve seen those photographs from space of the Earth at night with cities lit up like Christmas trees. Imagine that scene with a hurricane added.
NASA/NOAA’s Suomi NPP Captures Night-time View of Sandy’s Landfall
As Hurricane Sandy made a historic landfall on the New Jersey coast during the night of Oct. 29, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite captured this night-time view of the storm. This image provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison is a composite of several satellite passes over North America taken 16 to18 hours before Sandy’s landfall.
The storm was captured by a special “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as auroras, airglow, gas flares, city lights, fires and reflected moonlight. City lights in the south and mid-section of the United States are visible in the image.
William Straka, associate researcher at Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains that since there was a full moon there was the maximum illumination of the clouds.
“You can see that Sandy is pulling energy both from Canada as well as off in the eastern part of the Atlantic,” Straka said. “Typically forecasters use only the infrared bands at night to look at the structure of the storm. However, using images from the new day/night band sensor in addition to the thermal channels can provide a more complete and unique view of hurricanes at night.”
VIIRS is one of five instruments onboard Suomi NPP. The mission is the result of a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
On Monday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m. EDT, Hurricane Sandy made landfall 5 miles (10 km) south of Atlantic City, N.J., near 39 degrees 24 minutes north latitude and 74 degrees 30 minutes west longitude. At the time of landfall, Sandy’s maximum sustained winds were near 80 mph (130 kph) and it was moving to the west-northwest at 23 mph (37 kph). According to the National Hurricane Center, hurricane-force winds extended outward to 175 miles (280 km) from the center, and tropical-storm-force winds extended 485 miles (780 km). Sandy’s minimum central pressure at the time of landfall was 946 millibars or 27.93 inches.
Suomi NPP was launched on Oct. 28, 2011, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. One year later, Suomi NPP has orbited Earth more than 5,000 times and begun returning images and data that provide critical weather and climate measurements of complex Earth systems.
Suomi NPP observes Earth’s surface twice every 24-hour day, once in daylight and once at night. NPP flies 512 miles (824 kilometers) above the surface in a polar orbit, circling the planet about 14 times a day. NPP sends its data once an orbit to the ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and continuously to local direct broadcast users.
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The energy equivalent of a ton of TNT is 4.2 gigajoules.
Paul Schauble says…”
“You are seeing the boundary between two satellite passes.”
This can not be so as this straight line western margin curves steeply westward after it reaches Hudson Bay. The two passes were at different times, day and hight.
I was reminded of Steve’s initial interest in the temperature hockey stick because straight line shapes with sharp diversions almost never occur naturally.
Oddly, this margin looks like a hockey stick rotated counter-clockwise 90 deg.
It must be a sign from the skydragon.
Kev, “Ten thousand nuclear bombs” is really less informative than saying that the Arctic gained or lost 10,000 Manhattans. Nuclear bombs come in a very broad range of sizes from Kiloton through Megaton ranges, while the area of Manhattan is fixed – pretty much. It is simply saying that the storm has huge energy and can be really destructive.
When you figure that a storm 1,000 miles in diameter, roughly circular, has an area of somewhat less than 800,000 square miles, That would be a nuclear bomb about every 80 square miles. Bomb size would be important. Really big bombs in the megaton range, that would be really, really bad, total destruction due to blast and thermal energy. In the tactical nuke range, it probably be survivable in the near term near the edges. An average lightning bolt has a yield of about 1 kiloton so 16 such bolts yields about the same destructive energy as the Hiroshima bomb did. I seen that many bolts with 15 minutes. The short is that comparing storms to nukes doesn’t tell you much regardless of the wow! factor.
RE: Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite
Anyone know the Finnish connection? (IE: Suomi)
To Kev-in-Uk:
See the postings above by Doug Huffman. I was going to post the identical information. As Duster says, nuclear bombs come in many sizes. Perhaps what was meant was the size of the original Hiroshima bomb, roughly estimated at 12-14 kilotons of TNT. Since the daily energy release of a large hurricane is in the range of 10^18 Joules, this figure would makes sense:
10000 Hiroshima-sized bombs X ( 14000 Tons/ bomb ) X 4.2 x10^9 Joules / Ton = 5.88 x 10^17 Joules
Remember, though, that what does damage in a nuclear explosion (or a hurricane), is the sudden release of energy. That huge amount of energy being released by a hurricane is over the 86,400 seconds of a day, not in the 10 microseconds of a nuclear fireball forming. Earthquakes, too, release huge amounts of energy, and achieve their vastly more devastating results because all the energy released is in a matter of seconds.