Nighttime image of Hurricanes John and Helene acquired on September 26, 2024, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the joint NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 platform. Hurricane John can be seen skirting the western coast of Mexico and Hurricane Helene is fast approaching Florida from the Gulf of Mexico. The hazy band near the top of the image just below the word "Canada" is the aurora borealis.
Hurricane John initially made landfall on Mexico's Guerrero state on Monday (September 23), moved out into the Pacific where it regained strength, and is tracking to make landfall on Mexico a second time on Thursday (September 26). Hurricane Helene is expected make landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida on Thursday (September 26) as a Category 3 or 4 storm and could produce storm surges as high as 20 feet.
The Black Marble Nighttime Blue/Yellow Composite (Day/Night Band) is a false-color composite using the VIIRS at-sensor radiance and the brightness temperatures from the M15 band. Data are provided by NASA's VJ146A1 product using NOAA-20 platform observations.
Originally designed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and incorporated into NASA research and applications efforts, the Black Marble false-color scheme shows nighttime city lights in shades of yellow with infrared, nighttime cloud presence in shades of blue. During bright moonlight conditions, moonlight reflected from cloud tops and the land surface may also provide a yellow hue to these features. Comparisons of cloud-free conditions before and after a period of significant change, such as new city growth, disasters, fires, or other factors, may exhibit a change in emitted light (yellows) from those features over time.
Visit Worldview to visualize near real-time imagery from NASA's EOSDIS; explore past imagery in our Worldview weekly image archive.
Dataset
VJ146A1G_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ146A1_NRT.002
