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Hurricane Floyd was a destructive hurricane that hit North Carolina and New Jersey during the 1999 Atlantic hurricane season. The image above was taken of Floyd near its peak intensity, and because the image is so striking, it has often been attributed to other, more recent destructive storms such as Hurricane Jeanne and Hurricane Katrina.
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This false-color satellite image of Hurricane Wilma was taken at 13:15 UTC on October 19, 2005, just hours after Wilma had intensified to become the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever observed with a pressure of 882 mbar. In this picture, Wilma has a 2 nautical mile wide eye, the smallest on record.
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Hurricane Emily near peak intensity on July 16, 2005. This image was captured by MODIS on the Terra satellite.
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Hurricane Catarina near peak intensity on March 26, 2004. This image was taken from the International Space Station.
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Cyclone Inigo near peak intensity, as a Category 5 severe tropical cyclone on the Australian region scale, with 10-minute sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) and 1-minute sustained winds of 160 miles per hour (260 km/h). This image was taken from by one of NASA's EOSDIS satellites on April 4, 2003, while the cyclone was to the south of Indonesia.
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Typhoon Nida as a 150-mph typhoon. This image was taken by Jacques Descloitres from MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC on May 17, 2004, while the typhoon was making landfall on the Philippines.
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Tropical Storm Allison over Mississippi as a Subtropical Storm on June 11, 2001. Despite the eye feature, Allison only has winds of 45 mph. The picture is a radar reflectivity image from Mobile, Alabama.
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Hurricane Elida as a Category 5 hurricane on July 25, 2002. The hurricane is located in the eastern Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico.
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Flooding in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina's landfall on Buras-Triumph, on August 29, 2005. Katrina, the most costly hurricane in recorded history, flooded 80% of the city and devastated much of the Gulf Coast of the United States.
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The map of global tropical cyclone tracks from 1985 to 2005 includes hundreds of systems that affected over a dozen countries. This picture was made using NASA imagery and data from various meteorological agencies.
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Hurricane Mitch near peak intensity. When this photo was taken, Mitch was in the Caribbean Sea off the coast of Central America.
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This photograph shows the bowl-shaped eye of Typhoon Yuri in the western Pacific Ocean just west of the Northern Mariana Islands. The eye wall descends almost to the sea surface, a distance of nearly 45,000 feet (13 800 meters). In this case the eye is filled with clouds, but in many cases the sea surface can be seen through the eye. Yuri grew to super typhoon status, packing maximum sustained winds estimated at 165 miles per hour (270 km/h). The storm moved west toward the Philippines before turning northeast into the north Pacific Ocean, thus avoiding any major landmass.
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Cyclone Zoe was near its record peak intensity on late December 27, 2002 when this image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite. Cyclone Zoe was one of the most intense tropical cyclones ever observed in the South West Pacific Ocean.
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Hurricane Alice is the only known Atlantic hurricane to span two calendar years, and one of only two named tropical cyclones to do so in the North Atlantic basin. This image of the PPI scope of SPS-6 radar on the USS MIDWAY shows the rare January hurricane northeast of British Virgin Islands.
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A train of four tropical cyclones is lined up in the southern Indian Ocean east of Madagascar (left) on February 12, 2003. This true-color image of the storms was made from observations collected by alternating passes of the Aqua and Terra satellites. The cyclones pictured are (west to east) Gerry, Hape, Isha, and Fiona of the 2003 Southwest Indian cyclone season. Terra satellite passed over this area in the morning, moving east to west, and contributing the first and third chunks of the image (from right to left). Aqua satellite passed over in the afternoon, also moving east to west, contributing the second and fourth chunks.
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The MODIS instrument onboard NASA's Terra satellite captured this true-color image of Tropical Cyclone Gafilo churning in the waters northwest of Madagascar on March 6, 2004. At the time this image was taken, Gafilo has sustained winds of approximately 160 mph. Cyclone warnings had been posted for all of northwestern Madagascar.
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Tents are distributed by FEMA to families on Guam as temporary shelter while repairing damages to their homes from Typhoon Pongsona in December 2002.
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Track map of the 1992 Pacific hurricane season, the most active Pacific hurricane season on record.
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Remnants of Hurricane Agnes over the Northeastern United States. Agnes dropped torrential and record-breaking rainfall, causing over $2 billion in damage (1972 USD) and more than 100 deaths. The name was later retired.
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This is a photomosaic of the first natural color images of the Earth successfully taken from a high-altitude rocket. It image shows a large swathe of land to the south and east of the launch site and a tropical cyclone is visible over Del Rio, Texas. This image is also the first ever taken from a sufficient altitude to show the large scale structure of a storm and hints at the promise of meteorological satellites. The rocket was a US Navy sounding rocket launched at 1815 GMT on October 5, 1954 from White Sands, New Mexico and it was at an altitude of about 100 miles when this image was captured. There is a paper available describing this rocket launch and the associated imagery in the Monthly Weather Review.
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Typhoon Man-yi (04W) off the coast of Taiwan, near peak intensity, as seen from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite on July 12, 2007. Man-Yi later weakened and struck Japan, causing three casualties.
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Visual comparison of Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Andrew. The two storms are at similar positions and nearly identical intensities (933 mbar), but Hurricane Floyd is remarkably larger. In 1999 at the time of Floyd, it was believed that the wind speeds of the hurricanes were nearly identical as well, at 120 knots (140 mph, 220 km/h). In 2002, however, hurricane re-analysis concluded that Andrew had stronger winds than had previously been thought, and in the picture the storm winds are actually close to 145 knots (165 mph, 270 km/h).
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View of the eyewall of Hurricane Katrina taken on Aug. 28, 2005, as seen from an NOAA WP-3D Orion hurricane hunter aircraft before the storm made landfall on the United States Gulf Coast.
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Surrounding the eye of the hurricane is a ring of thunderstorms, called the eyewall. Rainbands surround the eye of the storm in concentric circles. In the eyewall and in the rainbands, warm, moist air rises, while in the eye and around the rainbands, air from higher in the atmosphere sinks back toward the surface. The rising air cools, and water vapor in the air condenses into rain. Sinking air warms and dries, creating a calm, cloud-free area in the eye.
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Tropical Storm Zeta on January 4, 2006. At that time, Zeta still had sustained winds of around 100 kilometers per hour (63 miles per hour), a steady strength the storm had maintained for several days, with a very slight increase in power.
After the previous record-holding storm season of 1933, which saw 21 named storms, weather forecasters established a convention of using just 21 letters of the alphabet (the last letter being W) to begin the names of Atlantic tropical storms. After Hurricane Wilma in October 2005, forecasters turned to the Greek alphabet. Zeta is the sixth letter of that alphabet, and this is the 27th named storm of 2005. One month after 2005’s record-breaking storm season officially ended, this storm appeared roughly 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the southwest of the Azores Islands.
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Unusual path of Typhoon Wayne, among the longest lasting Pacific typhoons on record. It formed to the west of the Philippines on August 16, and after looping to the northwest it attained typhoon status. Wayne turned to the northeast, striking Taiwan before turning to the southwest and weakening to tropical depression status. It then turned eastward and to the northeast, then re-attained typhoon status before changing its motion to the west. On September 5 it crossed northern Hainan Island, and the next day it dissipated after striking northern Vietnam. Typhoon Wayne caused over 71 fatalities along its path.
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Satellite image of Hurricane Rita in the central Gulf of Mexico while near peak intensity; within hours the hurricane would attain a minimum pressure of 895 mbar, which was the lowest recorded pressure on record in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Crew members on the Space Shuttle Endeavour captured this image around Noon CDT of Hurricane Dean in the Caribbean. At the time the shuttle and International Space Station passed overhead, the Category 4 storm was moving westerly at 17 mph nearing Jamaica carrying sustained winds of 150 mph.
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Rainfall total map of Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. The rainfall caused severe flooding along its path, particularly near Dallas, resulting in over $6 billion in damage. Map provided by David Roth, Hydrometeorological Prediction Center.
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Season track map of the 1969 Atlantic hurricane season, which began in July with the formation of Tropical Storm Anna. The season was among the most active on record, and included the catastrophic Hurricane Camille
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Damage from Hurricane Andrew in August 1992, in South Florida.
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A boarded up flooded out home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, 2005
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The emblem of the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, also known by its nickname, Hurricane Hunters. The squadron is a flying unit of the United States Air Force, and "the only Department of Defense organization still flying into tropical storms and hurricanes." It flies into tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Central Pacific Ocean for the specific purpose of directly measuring weather data in and around those storms.