Night View of Hurricane Sandy

This image of Hurricane Sandy was acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite around 2:42 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (06:42 Universal Time) on October 28, 2012. Suomi NPP was launched one year ago today on a mission to extend and enhance long-term records of key environmental data.

The storm was captured by a special "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as auroras, airglow, gas flares, city lights, fires, and reflected moonlight. In this case, the cloud tops were lit by the nearly full Moon (full occurs on October 29). Some city lights in Florida and Georgia are also visible through the clouds.

At the time of the image, the U.S. National Hurricane Center estimated Sandy's location to be 31.5¡ North and 73.7¡ West, 275 miles (445 kilometers) south-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and moving northeast at 14 miles (22 kilometers) per hour. Maximum sustained winds were 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour, and the minimum central barometric pressure was 960 millibars (28.35 inches).

Forecasters predicted that the storm would head north-northeast until the morning of October 29, and then take a turn to the northwest into the coastline of Delaware, New Jersey, or New York. The tropical cyclone is being blocked by an intense high-pressure system over the North Atlantic and is expected to merge with a winter weather system moving across North America. Sandy will likely become a post-tropical storm that could affect an area from the Carolinas to New England, and as far inland as the Great Lakes. The National Weather Service described the unusual merging (PDF) and what it might mean.