Laura Makes Landfall
August 31st, 2020
After making landfall near Cameron, Louisiana, as a category 4 storm, Hurricane Laura continued to move northward over western Louisiana. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NOAA-20 acquired this image of Hurricane Laura at 2:50 a.m. Central Daylight Time on August 27, 2020, about two hours after the storm made landfall. Clouds are shown in infrared using brightness temperature data, which is useful for distinguishing cooler cloud structures from the warmer surface below. That data is overlaid on composite imagery of city lights from NASA’s Black Marble dataset.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, and Black Marble data from NASA/GSFC. Caption by Adam Voiland.