Satellite Images Reveal Hurricane Helene’s Devastating Aftermath

Satellite images of the American southeast taken over the past few days are showcasing the disastrous impacts of Hurricane Helene at scale.

The images were taken by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites and reveal the massive areas in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and other states that remain without power.

Many of the nighttime images were taken by the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite, which has a low-light sensor that allows imaging of nighttime light emissions—a reasonable indicator from space of areas that have power and those that don’t. Images of the devastation in the region were also captured by the NOAA-20 satellite mission. The nighttime images were created by the Black Marble Science team—a nod to the work they do, concentrating on visualizing the Earth’s surface when it’s not lit up by the Sun.

“Satellite-derived nighttime lights products like Black Marble are invaluable for capturing widespread outages in distributed energy systems,” said Ranjay Shrestha, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the team, in a NASA Earth Observatory release. “These images not only reveal the immediate impact of disasters at the neighborhood scale but also provide insights into recovery trends over time, aiding in response, resource allocation, and damage assessment.”

The storm made landfall on Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 storm with wind speeds exceeding 140 miles per hour (225 kilometers per hour). The storm wiped out power for millions of people across the U.S. southeast and caused devastating flooding inland, especially in Tennessee and western North Carolina. Below, you can see a pre-storm composite image of power in Augusta, Georgia, in August, and that same area after Hurricane Helene came to town.

According to the same release, images of western North Carolina from September 28 were not available due to cloud cover.

Georgia Power stated on its website that as of Wednesday afternoon, 200,000 customers remained without power; based on a company outage map, those outages were concentrated in Augusta and the state’s southeast. The company is still in the process of repairing or replacing over 8,000 power poles damaged by the storm, as well as replacing over 1,500 transformers, 1,000 miles of wire, and removing more than 3,200 trees which remain on power lines.

In a roughly 18-hour period—from the night of September 26 through the afternoon of September 27—Helene made landfall and carved its path into southern Appalachia. Besides causing widespread power outages and flooding, the storm beget tornadoes, six of which were reported in southeast North Carolina and northeast South Carolina the morning of September 27, with paths ranging from 2.42 miles long and with 60 mile-per-hour winds up to 6.67 miles long and 95 mile-per-hour winds.

The storm also kicked up seafloor sediment in the Gulf of Mexico, changing the color of the waters of the Florida coast from a dark blue to a much lighter bluish-green, which you can see below. According to an Earth Observatory release, some of the color change is due to suspended sediment in the water, but much of it is also due to the light’s reflection off beds of seagrass and coral reefs, which is why the waters off the Bahamas is the same color.

There is much rebuilding that must be done following the storm; according to CNBC, the recovery efforts could cost $34 billion. The current death toll from the storm is 213 people, according to The Washington Post, though hundreds remain unaccounted for.