NASA's OPERA Project Generates Radar Image of Hurricane Helene

NASA's Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis (OPERA) project generated a radar image of Hurricane Helene on Friday, Sept. 26, 2024, at 7:38 p.m. local time, as the storm approached the Florida coast. One of the largest storms to develop in the Gulf of Mexico in the last century, Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in the Big Bend area of Florida at about 11:10 p.m.

The data shown in the image is from the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instrument on the Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), and processed by OPERA into a data product called OPERA RTC-S1. The OPERA RTC-S1 image was converted to a false color image. In this color scale, vegetated areas appear green, urban areas appear white/pink, calm water appears black, and rough water appears purple or magenta. The eye of the hurricane can be clearly seen as a large dark patch in the Gulf of Mexico. The OPERA RTC-S1 image was superimposed on a Google Earth satellite background shown in grayscale and the ESRI Boundaries Places layer.

The OPERA project, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and funded by the U.S. Group on Earth Observation's Satellite Needs Working Group, creates remote sensing products to address Earth observation needs across U.S. civilian federal agencies.

The image contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by ESA, Google Earth Satellite Imagery, and OPERA RTC-S1 imagery.

More information about OPERA can be found at https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/go/opera/.