Nighttime view of Hurricane Laura
Nighttime view of Hurricane Laura. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features a nighttime view of Hurricane Laura as the storm moved northward across Louisiana.
The storm made landfall near Cameron, Louisiana at 1:00 a.m. Central Daylight Time on August 27, 2020 as a category 4 storm with maximum wind speeds of 150 miles per hour.
The image was captured about two hours after landfall by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NOAA-20.
Hurricane Laura was a deadly and destructive Category 4 Atlantic hurricane that tied with 1856 Last Island hurricane as the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the U.S. state of Louisiana, as measured by maximum sustained winds. The twelfth named storm, fourth hurricane, and first major hurricane of the very active 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, Laura originated from a large tropical wave that moved off the West African coast on August 16 and became a tropical depression on August 20. Laura intensified into a tropical storm a day later, becoming the earliest twelfth named storm on record in the North Atlantic basin, forming eight days earlier than 1995’s Hurricane Luis.
Laura first hit the Lesser Antilles and brushed Puerto Rico as a tropical storm, then moved across the island of Hispaniola, killing 31 people in Haiti and four in the Dominican Republic. The storm then moved across the length of Cuba, prompting tropical storm warnings and the evacuation of more than 260,000 people there. Subsequently, the outer rainbands extended into the Florida Keys and South Florida. Laura then moved across the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening slowly at first, before a period of rapid intensification on August 26. That day, Laura became a major hurric
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
