Turbulent Tropical Skies

Turbulent Tropical Skies

On September 4, 2019, a loose chain of tropical cyclones lined up across the Western Hemisphere. At the time of this image (17:10 Universal Time) Hurricane Juliette in the East Pacific and Hurricane Dorian in the Atlantic were both category 2 storms.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Fernand packed sustained winds of 45 miles (75 kilometers) per hour and had just recently made landfall over northeastern Mexico. Gabrielle strengthened into a tropical storm on September 4 over the eastern Atlantic, and had sustained winds of 50 miles (85 kilometers) around the time of this image.

Data for the simulated natural-color image were acquired with the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16. GOES-16 is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); NASA helps develop and launch the GOES series of satellites.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using GOES 16 imagery courtesy of NOAA and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). Caption by Kathryn Hansen.

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