NASA's OPERA Project Generates Radar Image of Hurricane Helene

NASA's Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project generated a radar image of Hurricane Helene on Friday, Sept. 26, 2024, at 7:38 p.m. local time, as the storm approached the Florida coast. One of the largest storms to develop in the Gulf of Mexico in the last century, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in the Big Bend area of Florida at about 11:10 p.m. The data shown in the image is from the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument on the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), and processed by OPERA into a data product called OPERA RTC-S1. The OPERA RTC-S1 image was converted to a false color image. In this color scale, vegetated areas appear green, urban areas appear white/pink, calm water appears black, and rough water appears purple or magenta. The eye of the hurricane can be clearly seen as a large dark patch in the Gulf of Mexico. The OPERA RTC-S1 image was superimposed on a Google Earth satellite background shown in grayscale and the ESRI Boundaries Places layer. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26414