By August 6, 2008, Tropical Storm Edouard had come ashore in Texas. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the storm at 2:17 p.m. local time (19:17 UTC) on August 5 as the satellite passed over the Gulf of Mexico and southwestern United States. In this image, the storm has a flattened spiral, with clouds reaching from New Orleans to central Texas. It possessed the spiral shape of a strong storm system, but lacked the well-organized and powerful winds of more severe hurricanes.
As expected, Edouard never became a hurricane and was downgraded from a tropical storm to tropical depression near the time MODIS acquired this image. According to a report from the U.S. National Hurricane Center, elevated oil rigs south of the Louisiana coast reported sustained winds of 72 to 89 kilometers (45 to 55 miles) per hour, well below the wind-speed threshold for a Category 1 hurricane. Without ever reaching hurricane status, the storm made landfall west of the Texas-Louisiana border, east of Galveston, Texas. Besides strong winds, heavy rains, and a brief electrical outage, Edouard caused little damage.
You can download a 250-meter-resolution KMZ file of the storm suitable for use with Google Earth.
NASA image by Jesse, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Direct Broadcast facility at the University of Wisconsin’'s Space Science and Engineering Center.
