Consider the following wind vector maps produced from scatterometer observations. | |
August 25, 2005, at 08:37 UTC (4:37 a.m. in Florida) | August 29, 2005, just before the storm made landfall
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These two images were acquired 4 days apart. In the first image, Tropical Storm Katrina was observed by NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite on August 25, 2005, at 08:37 UTC (4:37 a.m. in Florida). The image depicts wind speed in color and wind direction with small barbs. White barbs point to areas of heavy rain. The highest wind speeds, shown in purple, surround the center of the storm. At the time this image was acquired, the storm had achieved sustained winds of 80 kilometers per hour (50 miles per hour; 43 knots), but had not yet reached hurricane strength. This was a slowly moving storm (just 13 km/hr (8 mph)), according to the National Hurricane Center, that slowed further when it moved over land, lingering for a comparatively long time over a given area, dumping 15-25 centimeters (6-10 inches) of rain over Florida and the Bahamas. By the time the second image was acquired (August 29, 2005, just before the storm made landfall), Katrina had evolved to a Category 4 storm with hurricane force winds. This image uses the same key (color for speed, barb for direction, etc.) as the previous image, and was also acquired by the NASA QuikSCAT satellite. |