Hurricane Matthew, all over social media. Original source unknown.
IN HARM'S WAY: For a few days, we (and a WHOLE lot of other people) have been tracking the path of a storm named Matthew, spinning in the Atlantic Ocean.
Right now, it's wreaking havoc in Haiti. By Thursday, it's supposed to hit the Space Coast.
The storm is a monster. Enormous. It seems to cover more than a quarter of the globe in this video from the International Space Station.
The video was taken from 250 miles above the storm at 1:15 p.m. Pacific time on Oct. 3. It was a Category 4 hurricane at that point.
It has done its damage in Haiti a. "It's the worst hurricane that I've seen during my life," Fidele Nicolas, a civil protection official in Nippes, Haiti, told the Associated Press. "It destroyed schools, roads, other structures," he said. Matthew also hit Cuba, and now it's on a crash course for the Bahamas.
And here's an animation of NOAA's GOES-East satellite imagery from Oct. 2 to Oct. 4, 2016, showing Matthew moving through the Caribbean Sea and making landfall on western Haiti today.
https://youtu.be/xjYnU0TOoQc
Credits: NASA/NOAA GOES Project
This event serves as a reminder that NASA is about a whole lot more than 'just' spaceflight. The agency performs so much Earth-science related work. Like check out this map generated on Oct. 2 at 2:46 Pacific time by GPM’s Microwave Imager (GMI) and Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) instruments. They collected data used to make this map of rainfall occurring within Hurricane Matthew. Some areas show in excess of 6.4 inches (163 mm) per hour.
Credits: NASA/JAXA, Hal Pierce
As of right this moment (8 p.m. on Oct. 4), Matthew has maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. Mix that big wind with the huge rain. It's a recipe for disaster.
I always remember "Nature bats last."
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