As storms continue to batter Houston, satellite images show the city clouded by a mid-May derecho

Houston just can’t catch a break. After a series of extreme thunderstorms ripped through on May 16, knocking out power to large parts of the city, new storms brought permanent misery there — and, for that matter, large swaths of the Lone Star State and beyond.

Tuesday May 28 powerful storms hit Texas with high winds and baseball-sized hail, tragically causing one death. Houston was not spared: the streets were flooded for the second time in two weeks, and more than 100,000 CenterPoint Energy customers in the region found themselves without electricity.

And the beat continues: On Thursday morning, thunderstorms began developing across North Texas, with severe weather forecast elsewhere in the state for the rest of the day — and into the weekend.

For millions of Texans, the chaos began on May 16, when this band of extreme thunderstorms produced winds reaching 100 miles per hour. The winds were particularly strong, qualifying the event as “derecho.”

In Houston, derechos broke windows and tore roofs off homes and businesses. It also downed power lines and damaged transformers and other electrical infrastructure, leaving nearly a million people without power.

The view from space

The remote sensing images below, acquired by different satellites, highlight the drama of what happened in mid-May – and what continues to happen.

This video shows the band of storms moving through Texas and Houston from May 16-17:

The animation consists of images acquired by the GOES-East geostationary satellite.

Another spacecraft, the polar orbiting spacecraft Suomi Nuclear Power Plant SatelliteImages captured showing what the aftermath looked like from space:

The front image in the animation is a composite showing normal nighttime light conditions in April 2024, according to NASA. The following image shows the view from space early on May 18, after the derecho knocked out power to much of Houston.

If you are wondering how this data was acquired and processed, here is NASA’s detailed explanation:

“The maps are based on data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA-NOAA Suomi Nuclear Power Plant Satellite. VIIRS measures nighttime light emissions and reflections via its day-night group. This detection capacity makes it possible to distinguish the intensity of the lights and to observe their evolution. »

The VIIRS data was overlaid on the maps of the HD Black Marble Project. “The base map was constructed from data collected by Landsat9“, according to NASA. “Dark gray areas with hatching are where cloud cover prevented VIIRS from collecting data on nighttime lights. The data has been processed. . . to account for changes in the landscape, atmosphere and phase of the Moon, and to filter out stray light from sources that are not electric lights.

Another satellite also saw what happened when the lights went out:

The images used in this animation were acquired by the NOAA satellites 20 and 21 in polar orbit. The previous image, taken on March 29, shows what the city lights looked like from space on an ordinary night. The later image, acquired on May 19, shows the impact of lingering power outages around the city caused by the derecho.

What is the source of all this bad weather? I hope to write an article about this in the coming days.

Suffice it to say, this is linked to a violent clash between a massive, long-lasting heat dome centered over Mexico (and extending into the U.S. Gulf states) and cooler air to the north and west. In a phenomenon known as “ring of fire“Weather, the jet stream swept storms along the boundary between these air masses.

Stay tuned for more…