Hurricane Douglas Closing on Hawaii
As spotted yesterday, Hurricane Douglas is approaching Hawaii. This is a relatively rare event for Hawaii as it is normally away from the path of most hurricanes.
The image below shows a full colour image of Douglas approaching the main island of Hawaii which is visible, just, from the outline on the left edge towards the bottom corner. The storm is clearly dwarfing the island.
It is much easier to see the detail of the storm system and the eastern most islands of Hawaii in this single frequency (channel 2) image.
Note how the size of the storm has decreased compared to images captured about 24 hours ago. This may result in the impact on Hawaii being lessened.
Animating some of the captured frames showing the visible light, you can see the rotation of the system as it moves towards Hawaii. There are some slight jumps from some frames being missed, plus you see the approach of night from the bottom right. Note that this is slightly offset due to the tilt of the earth. And there is a blue tint as dusk falls, which will be linked to the Rayleigh scattering as the sun gets low in the sky.
In contrast, the full colour image showing around California plus surrounding states is a lot more tranquil. It is very interesting to see the cloud at the bottom left of the image hugging the coastline.
