“The NOAA-NASA satellite GOES-16 captured this geocolor image of Hurricane Irma passing the eastern end of Cuba at about 8:00 a.m. EDT on Sept. 8, 2017… Please note: GOES-16 data are currently experimental and undergoing testing and hence should not be used operationally.” Entire NOAA caption can be viewed at this link. Image Credit: NOAA/NASA

7:40 p.m. Sept. 9: We are currently in Largo, Florida, having evacuated from our home in Saint Petersburg, waiting for what is being anticipated as the worst weather event in the Tampa Bay area since 1960’s Hurricane Donna. As of 7:30 p.m. EDT, the track has the storm making its way through Tampa Bay in the early hours of Monday, Sept. 10 as a Category 3 hurricane. We are in a non-evacuation zone with plenty of food, sodas, water, and snacks, plus we have our cat, Felix, here by us, so we’re about as safe as we will be given the situation. Still very nerve-wracking, nobody here is sure what they’ll endure or find at homes once the evacuation orders lift. I figured I’d deal with my nerves by trying to document the storm as much as I can. 

Video filmed around 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 9. Please excuse the terrible production quality.

12 a.m. Sept. 10: Sleepless, so I thought I’d share this cool 1960 radar image of Hurricane Donna over the Florida Keys, which was mentioned in the above update. As you can tell, radar technology at that time was rudimentary; the colorful, detailed images we see presently were still well into the future, but these images did mitigate what could’ve been a worse loss of human life and infrastructure in Florida. I know I linked a Wikipedia article above, but it’s not a bad read, plus there is a cool time-lapse of radar images of Donna in there, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Radar image of Hurricane Donna over the Florida Keys, 1960. Retrieved from http://www.whyy.org/tv12/franklinfacts/sep1200ff.html (Original source: NOAA)

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Emily Carney is a writer, space enthusiast, and creator of the This Space Available space blog, published since 2010. In January 2019, Emily’s This Space Available blog was incorporated into the National Space Society’s blog. The content of Emily’s blog can be accessed via the This Space Available blog category.

Note: The views expressed in This Space Available are those of the author and should not be considered as representing the positions or views of the National Space Society.