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Hurricane Katrina in 2005

By Scott Lindstrom •

GOES-12 10.7 µm IR images [click to play mp4 animation]

GOES-12 10.7 µm IR images [click to play mp4 animation]

August 28 2015 is the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina achieving Category 5 status (on the Saffir-Simpson Scale) in the central Gulf of Mexico. The mp4 animation above (available here as a 490 megabyte animated gif, and on YouTube) shows the evolution of Katrina from a thunderstorm cluster in the Bahamas to a weak hurricane off the west coast of Florida to a Category 5 Hurricane in the central Gulf before weakening somewhat at landfall along the central Gulf coast. (The archive of National Hurricane Center advisories is here. The post-storm write-up is here.)

GOES-12 10.7 µm IR images [click to enlarge]

GOES-12 10.7 µm IR images [click to enlarge]

GOES-12 was in service as GOES-East during Katrina’s life, and as a GOES I-M satellite it lacked batteries to allow imaging through eclipse, which occurs as the satellite passes through the Earth’s shadow (solar panels in shadow do not provide power) in the weeks surrounding the Equinoxes. The toggle above from 28 August 2005 shows the last pre-eclipse image (0402 UTC) and the first post-eclipse image (0615 UTC); considerable organization of the storm has occurred in those two hours! GOES satellites from GOES-13 on have sufficient battery capacity to provide imagery through eclipse periods (for example, see this GOES-13 vs GOES-12 comparison during the landfall of Hurricane Ike along the Texas coast in 2008).

Katrina was featured in the CIMSS GOES Gallery back in 2005 (Link).

Categories: GOES-12, Historical, Tropical cyclones