2026 continues to be an intense year for hurricanes in the eastern Pacific Ocean as Nolo became the 6th system in that basin to reach category 4 or greater during this year. Its ascent to major hurricane status was also quite fast; over the course of less than 24 hours on the 26th and 27th of September 2026, Nolo strengthened from a strong Category 1 storm all the way to the Category 4/Category 5 boundary as it propagated westward to the south of Hawaii. Let’s take a look at 24 hours of hourly geostationary Band 13 images from GOES-18 (GOES West) showing the intensification of the storm. Watch how the eye transitions from somewhat irregularly-shaped to a perfect circle at the same time the cloud top temperatures drop significantly.

One of the GOES-18 mesoscale sectors was trained on Nolo as it underwent its intensification. Here’s the one-minute mesoscale imagery from 1300-1300 UTC (3:00–3:30 AM local time). You can even see what appears to be gravity waves propagating outward along Nolo’s top, especially in the northeastern sector of the storm, which would be indicative of very strong updrafts.

The CIMSS Tropical Cyclone group, as always, has been monitoring Nolo with a suite of products. Here’s a time series of the D-MINT automated intensity estimates. According to D-MINT, Nolo briefly peaked at Category 5 before rapidly declining. D-MINT also gives us an appreciation of how long Nolo hung around as a tropical depression before it began its intensification.

The CIMSS MIMIC product is sued to provide microwave imagery from polar orbiting satellites at geostationary-like time intervals. Here is an animation from 0000 on the 27th to 0000 on the 28th (2:00 PM on the 26th to 2:00 PM on the 27th), depicting the consolidation of a strong eye wall around the center of rotation.

So what caused this rapid intensification? The the weekly sea surface anomaly plot from NOAA’s Physical Science Laboratory can provide some insight. Note how the waters south of Hawaii are 1-2 degrees above normal while this year’s El Niño rages along the Equator.

The high winds are captured by satellite observations as well. Here’s a view of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-derived wind speed from one of Canada’s RADARSAT polar-orbiting satellites. Remember, SAR can only detect wind speed, not wind direction, so the directional indicators in this image are from numerical weather output. This particular image is from 1634 UTC (6:34 AM local time) on the 27th, when the storm was undergoing its intensification. Observed winds in teh northwestern sector are clearly exceeding the 100 kt top end of the color scale.

Nolo did have some impacts on the southern coasts of some of the Hawaiian islands, including flash flooding, tropical-storm-level wind gusts, and heavy surf. It is anticipated that Nolo will continue to weaken as it moves into the cooler waters west and northwest of the state of Hawaii.

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The launch of SpaceX Starship Flight 14 occurred at 12:48 UTC on 28 September 2026, from their Starbase facility along the South Texas coast. 1-minute imagery was not available for this launch — as it was for several previous Starship launches, most recently Flight 11 and Flight 9 — but the CONUS Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Water Vapor imagery at 1251 UTC (which was actually scanning the launch site around 12:52:20 UTC) captured the hottest thermal signature of the six Starship engines (red pixels), along with their trail of warm water vapor (brighter shades of yellow to darker shades of blue) as the rocket was ascending southeastward over the Gulf of Mexico (above).

In a sequence of interleaved CONUS Sector and Full Disk scan GOES-19 Rocket Plume RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below), the Full Disk image at 1250 UTC revealed hot thermal signatures (brighter shades of yellow-green) of both the “boostback burn” of the Super Heavy booster and the accelerating Starship (immediately following the separation of those two rocket stages).

A more oblique view from GOES-18 (GOES-West) using a Full Disk scan True Color RGB image at 1250 UTC (below) — which was actually scanning the launch site around 12:52:29 UTC — depicted the Super Heavy rocket booster’s lower-tropospheric condensation cloud near the Texas coast, in addition to the long shadow that was being cast west-northward across the Texas/Mexico border region (as the early morning sun was rising in the east).

The Super Heavy rocket booster condensation cloud (and its shadows) were also seen from an Earth-looking camera on Starship (below).

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5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Water Vapor images (above) included plots of surface pressure contours and surface fronts — which showed the evolution of a strong Nor’easter (Mean Sea Level Pressure anomaly) that produced high winds and/or heavy rainfall from Maryland to Maine (WPC Storm Summary) from 25 September – 27 September 2026. There were a few METAR sites that reported peak wind gusts greater than 50 knots (plotted in red) from New York to Massachusetts. The surface low moved inland across central New Jersey around 1500 UTC on 27 September, then moved offshore 6 hours later around 2100 UTC.

5-minute GOES-19 daytime True Color RGB + Nighttime Microphysics RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below) frequently provided a good view of the lower-altitude clouds defining the center of the Nor’easter circulation during that 2-day period.

Ample illumination from a Full Moon allowed for vivid nighttime VIIRS Day/Night Band images of the Nor’easter (below).

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Today is the Fall Equinox in the northern hemisphere and a great opportunity to show off some full disk GOES images. The passing of the seasons has always been marked by humans, sometimes because of agricultural significance, spiritual significance, community bonding, or simply to mark time. The fall (or autumnal) equinox marks the time when the sun is directly above the equator, as we transition seasons from summer to fall in the northern hemisphere (and it’s going from spring to summer in the southern hemisphere). This year the fall equinox is September 22, 2026. It can be seen in GOES visible band imagery at satellite sunrise or sunset where the terminator (the dividing line between night and day) is aligned perfectly north/south in the middle of a full disk visible band image. For the people in the northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox marks the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, which lasts until the winter solstice (usually December 21). This is the astronomical definition of the changing of seasons as the tilt of the earth on its axis will lead to summer in the southern hemisphere as we head into winter up here in the northern hemisphere.

Sunset and sunrise time-lapse animations from space (below) show the progression of the terminator from spring equinox, through summer solstice, to fall equinox from the satellite’s point of view. For these times of day the disk is “half” illuminated so the terminator formed by the shadow of the night-side of earth is easy to track. GOES-East sits over the equator above 75 West (which is in Columbia, near where the borders of Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia meet) and GOES-West sits over the equator above 137 West (which is out in the Pacific Ocean away from any major land masses – maybe the closest thing is French Polynesia, 680 miles to the southwest; and for reference, Hawaii is over 1700 miles to the northwest of the GOES-West subpoint). These two views provide coverage of nearly two thirds of the earth and so in addition to the terminator you can see some of the things that affected life across our hemisphere from major storm systems to smoke and dust. Technically sunrise, sunset, and local noon vary from day to day, but these animations use a consistent time every day that is close to sunrise or sunset.

Looking back at the past 6 months or so the CIMSS Satellite Blog has been full of interesting cases. We’ve covered: Earth Day, fog, flooding, hail, thunderstorms, tornadoes, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires and more!

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