A few days ago, Hurricane Paula was bearing down on Honduras and Mexico. While it caused some substantial flooding and destroyed some homes, it weakened rather quickly and is now a tropical storm near Cuba.
However, three days ago as the storm was battering the coast of Honduras, NASA’s MODIS captured a stunning image of the hurricane.
Here is what NASA said about the image:
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of Hurricane Paula at 11:20 a.m. CDT (16:20 UTC) on October 12 while over the Caribbean Sea, just off the coasts of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. Coiled around a distinct eye, the storm’s most intense clouds spanned roughly 200 kilometers (125 miles).
From their Earth Observatory “Image of the day”, you can download the image as a 6MB JPEG, or view it in Google Earth as an image overlay with this KMZ file
.
The Image of the Day site showcases some amazing images. We’ve shown you some of them on here in the past, such as the Tempe Town Lake Drain and a cool series of images that showed the growth of Las Vegas from 1984-2009. I strongly suggest visiting the site from time to time to see what kind of great stuff they’re putting out.