On July 15, 2003, at 12:55 EDT, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument onboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured this bird’s-eye view of Hurricane Claudette making landfall at Matagorda Bay on the middle Texas coast. At the time of this image, Claudette was packing maximum sustained winds of 80 mph (129 km per hour) with slightly higher gusts, classifying the storm as a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Claudette is expected to dump as much as 10 inches of rain in portions of Texas and Louisiana, and to produce storm surge flooding of 4 to 6 feet above normal tide levels. As Claudette moves inland, she will weaken rapidly, but will continue to dump copious amounts rain tonight and tomorrow.

Image courtesy Liam Gumley, University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center