Wicked Weather
Throughout the last week of October 2012, the U.S. closely followed Hurricane Sandy's every move. The epic storm delivered power outages, storm surges, erosion, flooding, property damage and fatalities along the Atlantic coast. NASA and NOAA satellites provided the images that made their way onto broadcast news and into the hands of decision makers. Only the view from space could capture Sandy's full evolution, from a tropical storm into a Category 1 hurricane that spanned 1,100 miles in diameter, wider than any other Atlantic hurricane on record. The time-lapse animation shows the hurricane during the two days leading up to landfall in New Jersey, as seen by the GOES-14 weather satellite.
Hurricane Sandy terrorized the U.S. East Coast before its timely demise on Halloween.
Hurricane Sandy crept north on Oct. 28-29. The animation shows the storm's movement in the daylight hours of both days.
On Oct. 23, Tropical Depression 18 extended more than 280 miles over the eastern Caribbean Sea and strengthened into Hurricane Sandy.
Tracking north along the coast of the Carolinas as a Category 1 storm, Sandy was still 575 miles south of New York City on Oct. 28.
By the afternoon of Oct. 29, Sandy was 110 miles southeast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and would soon make landfall.
Sandy covered most of the East Coast and kicked up turbid water along Florida on Oct. 30, as seen in this southward-looking image.
Remnants of the storm, with clouds illuminated by moonlight, passed over Pennsylvania before dawn on Oct. 31.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Cover image and animation courtesy of NASA/NOAA GOES Project Science Team
Oct. 23 image courtesy of NASA/GSFC MODIS Rapid Response Team
Oct. 28, 29 and 31 images courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data provided by Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies
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Writer
- Kathryn Hansen (Wyle Information Systems)
Release date
This page was originally published on Tuesday, November 6, 2012.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:52 PM EDT.