NASA satellites have been monitoring Hurricane Sandy for a a few days now, and as time goes on the storm just seems to get bigger, as seen in the image below.
Early on October 25, NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over Hurricane Sandy, allowing the AIRS instrument on board to capture an infrared image of the storm that showed a large area of very high, cold cloud tops indicating the power within the storm.
By 11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25, the eye was no longer apparent in satellite imagery or from aircraft observations. Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center noted that Sandy “has become somewhat disrupted on the western side by southwesterly flow from an upper-level low to the west.”
Since that time, NASA’s Terra satellite hove into view of the storm and found that it had grown since those early morning estimates, increasing in size by approximately 120 miles in diameter.
Strong thunderstorms are evident in the storm’s southern arm, which were positioned over the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and eastern Puerto Rico at the time of the capture. The centre of the storm was moving through the Bahamas, with the northwestern edge already spreading clouds over southern Florida.
At 2 p.m. EDT on Oct. 25, Sandy’s maximum sustained winds remain near 105 mph (165 kph). The storm is a Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale. Sandy’s center was located near 23 degrees 30 minutes north latitude and 75 degrees 24 minutes west longitude, just 25 miles (40 km) east of Great Exuma Island, Bahamas.
The current forecast track from the National Hurricane Center brings Sandy in for a landfall in central New Jersey on Tuesday, Oct. 30. Regardless, it appears that Sandy may be a strong wind event for the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
To keep up to date on NASA’s latest bulletins regarding Hurricane Sandy, watch NASA’s Sandy page here.
