Satellite Images Reveal Hurricane Helene’s Devastating Aftermath

Satellite images of the American southeast taken implicit the past fewer days are showcasing the disastrous impacts of Hurricane Helene astatine scale.

The images were taken by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites and uncover the monolithic areas successful Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and different states that stay without power.

Many of the nighttime images were taken by the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite, which has a low-light sensor that allows imaging of nighttime airy emissions—a tenable indicator from abstraction of areas that person powerfulness and those that don’t. Images of the devastation successful the portion were besides captured by the NOAA-20 outer mission. The nighttime images were created by the Black Marble Science team—a motion to the enactment they do, concentrating connected visualizing the Earth’s aboveground erstwhile it’s not lit up by the Sun.

“Satellite-derived nighttime lights products similar Black Marble are invaluable for capturing wide outages successful distributed vigor systems,” said Ranjay Shrestha, a idiosyncratic astatine NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a subordinate of the team, successful a NASA Earth Observatory release. “These images not lone uncover the contiguous interaction of disasters astatine the vicinity standard but besides supply insights into betterment trends implicit time, aiding successful response, assets allocation, and harm assessment.”

The tempest made landfall connected Florida’s Big Bend arsenic a Category 4 tempest with upwind speeds exceeding 140 miles per hr (225 kilometers per hour). The tempest wiped retired powerfulness for millions of radical crossed the U.S. southeast and caused devastating flooding inland, particularly successful Tennessee and occidental North Carolina. Below, you tin spot a pre-storm composite representation of powerfulness successful Augusta, Georgia, successful August, and that aforesaid country aft Hurricane Helene came to town.

According to the aforesaid release, images of occidental North Carolina from September 28 were not disposable owed to unreality cover.

Georgia Power stated connected its website that arsenic of Wednesday afternoon, 200,000 customers remained without power; based connected a institution outage map, those outages were concentrated successful Augusta and the state’s southeast. The institution is inactive successful the process of repairing oregon replacing implicit 8,000 powerfulness poles damaged by the storm, arsenic good arsenic replacing implicit 1,500 transformers, 1,000 miles of wire, and removing much than 3,200 trees which stay connected powerfulness lines.

In a astir 18-hour period—from the nighttime of September 26 done the day of September 27—Helene made landfall and carved its way into confederate Appalachia. Besides causing wide powerfulness outages and flooding, the tempest beget tornadoes, six of which were reported successful southeast North Carolina and northeast South Carolina the greeting of September 27, with paths ranging from 2.42 miles agelong and with 60 mile-per-hour winds up to 6.67 miles agelong and 95 mile-per-hour winds.

The tempest besides kicked up seafloor sediment successful the Gulf of Mexico, changing the colour of the waters of the Florida seashore from a acheronian bluish to a overmuch lighter bluish-green, which you tin spot below. According to an Earth Observatory release, immoderate of the colour alteration is owed to suspended sediment successful the water, but overmuch of it is besides owed to the light’s reflection disconnected beds of seagrass and coral reefs, which is wherefore the waters disconnected the Bahamas is the aforesaid color.

There is overmuch rebuilding that indispensable beryllium done pursuing the storm; according to CNBC, the betterment efforts could outgo $34 billion. The existent decease toll from the tempest is 213 people, according to The Washington Post, though hundreds stay unaccounted for.