A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet

• Credit:

  NASA image courtesy MODIS Rapid Response, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Michon Scott.

On July 17, 2011, Tropical Storm Bret hovered over the Atlantic Ocean, just east of Florida. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image the same day. Bret is a spiral-shaped cloud mass east-northeast of Miami.

At 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 18, the U.S. National Hurricane Center reported that Bret had maximum sustained winds of 50 miles (85 kilometers) per hour with higher gusts. A tropical storm watch was in effect for parts of the northwest Bahamas, where the storm might cause heavy rain. Bret was not expected to make landfall in the United States, however. Instead, the storm was moving toward the north-northeast, over the Atlantic Ocean.

• References

• National Hurricane Center. (2011, July 18). Tropical Storm Bret Advisory Archive. Accessed July 18, 2011.

Images & Animations

• Webmaster: Paul Przyborski
• NASA Official: Steven E. Platnick
• Database Updated: June 19, 2013