NASA has captured a bizarre photo of Hurricane Debby from space, just hours before the deadly storm hit the Florida coast.
The Category 1 storm made landfall early Monday morning in the state’s Big Bend region, a central area of the Panhandle.
Debby battered Florida with over 15 feet of rain, 80 mph winds, storm surges and flash flooding, leaving 207,000 homes without power.
NASA captured the new image using a satellite about 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, showing the giant, swirling storm cloud as it moves across Florida.
Debby claimed five lives, including that of a 13-year-old boy in Levy County after a tree fell on a mobile home southwest of Gainesville, the Associated Press reported.
NASA captured this satellite image of Hurricane Debbie just four hours before it made landfall in Florida
At 3 a.m. ET on Monday, NASA captured an image of Debby spinning just off the coast of Florida using the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16).
The image shows the hurricane just four hours before it made landfall in Florida.
GOES-16 is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
NASA helps develop and launch the GOES satellites, which observe the Earth from an altitude of about 35,000 kilometers above the equator.
The photo shows the outer bands of the hurricane, which brought two separate tornadoes to the state this week.
A NASA astronaut captured images of the devastating Hurricane Beryl from space last month.
Matthew Dominick captured the images while the International Space Station was flying more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) above the Caribbean.
NASA studies hurricanes from space using images. ‘The lookout helps scientists understand how climate change is affecting hurricanes and how communities can better prepare.’
The agency overseeing Debby, which is spreading across the East Coast.
In Sarasota, Florida, about 500 people were rescued from flooded homes. Nearly 200 people were rescued from floodwaters in Manatee County.
“We actually had twice as much rain as forecast,” Sarasota County Fire Chief David Rathbun said in an update on social media.
Power has been restored to many of the 207,000 homes that were without electricity Monday, but nearly 36,000 customers are still without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us.
A flooded home in Hillsborough County, FL, on August 6, 2024
In addition to the 13-year-old boy in Levy County, Hurricane Debby also killed a 19-year-old Georgia man whose house was hit by a tree, a 64-year-old truck driver from Mississippi whose vehicle ended up in a canal in Hillsborough County, and a 38-year-old woman and 12-year-old boy who were killed in a car crash in Dixie County.
Debby is no longer hurricane strength, but is now moving north as a tropical storm and bringing heavy rain to the East Coast.
Residents of Wimauma, a rural part of Hillsborough County, Florida, drive through floodwaters of the Little Manatee River on August 5, 2024.
The storm has already dumped more than a foot of rain in South Carolina and Georgia, with both states remaining under a flood warning until 6:45 p.m. ET tonight.
Debbie has moved slightly off the Georgia coast and is now over the Atlantic Ocean.
Officials say it could intensify before making a second landfall on the South Carolina coast on Thursday. The storm currently has sustained winds of about 45 miles per hour.
“Potentially historic heavy rainfall across southeastern Georgia and eastern South Carolina through Friday will likely result in areas of catastrophic flooding,” the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
“Heavy rainfall is likely to cause flooding in northern North Carolina, parts of the Mid-Atlantic states and southern New England through Sunday morning,” NHC said.