Hurricane Harvey looks even more threatening from outer space
A new video taken by cameras on the International Space Station show Hurricane Harvey swirling menacingly in the Gulf of Mexico.
The storm, which is forecast to hit the Texas coast late Friday night as a Category 3 storm on the Saffir Simpson Scale, is poised to become the first major hurricane (meaning Category 3 or above) to make landfall in the United States since 2005.
From space, the storm seems to fill the Space Station camera's field of view as it orbits 250 miles above the planet's surface.
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Astronauts also looked down on Harvey as they passed above the monster storm.
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That sight likely hit the three Americans on the station particularly hard because most NASA astronauts and their families live and work in and around Houston, a part of Texas in the path of the slow-moving hurricane.
The hurricane is also expected to meander above coastal Texas for days, dumping obscene amounts of rain on the state. This storm is particularly dangerous due to the threat of floods and rising waters at the coast and inland.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center is predicting that the storm will dump feet of rain on the state, with upwards of 35 inches predicted to fall in a large area from Corpus Christi to Houston.
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A storm this strong forecast to stall out over a populated area for days at a time has little to no precedent in U.S. hurricane history.
“The historical record of U.S. hurricanes gives us few, if any, analogs for a major hurricane landfall that transitions into a multi-day rainfall event as prolonged, extensive, and intense as the scenario painted by multiple forecast models for Harvey," Meteorologists Jeff Masters and Bob Henson of Weather Underground wrote on Friday.
Scientists will be keeping a close eye on Harvey using satellites in the coming days as the storm bears down on Texas.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
