A catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet

• Credit:

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

Irene was battering eastern North Carolina shortly before noon on August 27, 2011, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took this picture. At 11:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 27, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned that the Category 1 hurricane was centered about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 85 miles (140 kilometers) per hour.

The U.S. East Coast is outlined in black in this natural-color image. Spanning hundreds of kilometers, Irene engulfs most of the coast, extending from the Carolinas to New England.

By 11:00 p.m. EDT on August 28, Irene had lost significant power. The storm was a post-tropical cyclone centered about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Berlin, New Hampshire. Although the storm largely spared big cities, it still left millions without electricity and claimed at least two dozen lives, the Associated Press reported.

1. References

2. Gram, D., Associated Press. (2011, August 29). Irene spares big cities, but Vt. sees huge floods. Yahoo News. Accessed August 29, 2011.
3. National Hurricane Center. (2011, August 29). Hurricane Irene Advisory Archive. Accessed August 29, 2011.

Images & Animations

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• NASA Official: Steven E. Platnick
• Database Updated: May 7, 2013