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Incredible photos from space show off the historic East Coast 'bomb cyclone'

From space, the 'bomb cyclone' looks like a sinister punctuation mark.

Andrew Freedman

on January 4, 2018

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The East Coast "bomb cyclone" on Thursday looks both beautiful and sinister from space.

While scientists have been tracking storms using satellites in orbit for decades, they now have a brand new tool at their disposal: GOES-16, also called GOES-East.

The brand new satellite -- which wasn't available to scientists last winter -- is one of the most powerful weather-watching tools in history, able to take snapshots of the storm every minute.

The result? Some truly astonishing images.

SEE ALSO: A 'bomb cyclone,' explained

The storm, which is bringing blizzard conditions to areas from Virginia to Maine, along with hurricane-force wind gusts and damaging coastal flooding, looks like a classic non-tropical storm. It took on a comma shape, drawing in moisture all the way from the Bahamas, and dumping it into an Arctic air mass in place over the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast.

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Its minimum central air pressure, a key measure of its intensity, has been falling by double digits every few hours, greatly exceeding the criteria needed to fit the definition of a weather "bomb."

Such a term refers to the meteorological term "bombogenesis," which combines the words "bomb" and "cyclogensis," and means a storm that intensifies by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours.

The current storm has already seen a 53 millibar drop in just 21 hours, placing it in the top 5 percent of rapidly intensifying non-tropical storm systems.

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Computer model projections show that the minimum central pressure could fall to 947 millibars, which would be comparable to Hurricane Sandy when that storm made landfall in 2012.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, this storm, while not tropical in nature, has a massive wind field, bringing 60-mile-per-hour winds to New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Carolinas at the same time.

The center of the storm even developed an eye-like feature, clearly seen in this satellite image:

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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Check back here for more photos since it's an ideal time for weather geeks to save and share images of snowstorm porn throughout the day.

Andrew Freedman

Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.