2004 Hurricane Season: Global Satellite IR

Description:

The 2004 hurricane season started on July 31 with Hurricane Alex and continued all the way through to December 2 with Tropical Storm Otto. The season featured 15 tropical storms, 9 of which became hurricanes, and 6 of those were classified as major hurricanes. This over-active hurricane season tallied up a bill of $42 billion in damages, which at the time was record high. Florida took the brunt of the damage with 4 major hurricanes making landfall in the state. Two of the hurricanes, Frances and Jeanne, landed in almost the same location on the east coast of Florida only 3 weeks apart. It is estimated that one in every five homes in Florida was damaged in the 2004 hurricane season.

This data set was created using infrared satellites, which measure emitted heat. Where there are clouds, the satellites measure the heat emitted by the cloud rather than the ground below it. Because clouds are so much colder than the ground, they are easy to detect on IR satellite images. Areas that show up in the bright colors are extremely cold and the gray shades are areas that are warmer. The higher the cloud, the colder the cloud top will be and so it shows up vividly on the IR satellite image. Hurricanes and tropical storms are well developed weather systems and therefore have high clouds that are easy to detect in the IR satellite images.

Notable Features:

Name	Date	Peak Strength	Landfall Location	Damage Cost
Alex	Jul 31-Aug 6	Cat. 2	Outer Banks, NC	N/A
Bonnie	Aug 2-4,9-12	Trop. Storm	Florida Panhandle	N/A
Charley	Aug 9-15	Cat. 4	West Coast of Florida Coast of South Carolina	$ 14 billion
Danielle	Aug 13-21	Cat.2	No landfall	N/A
Earl	Aug 13-16	Trop. Storm	Windward Islands	N/A
Frances	Aug 24-Sep 6	Cat. 4	Sewall’s Point, FL St. Mark’s, FL	$ 8 billion
Gaston	Aug 27-Sep 1	Cat. 1	Coast of South Carolina	N/A
Hermine	Aug 29-31	Trop. Storm	No landfall as Trop. Storm	N/A
Ivan	Sep 2-16,22-24	Cat. 5	Gulf Shores, AL as cat. 3	$ 13 billion
Jeanne	Sep 13-27	Cat. 3	Stuart, FL (close to Frances’s first landfall)	$ 6 billion
Karl	Sep 16-24	Cat. 4	No landfall	N/A
Lisa	Sep 19-Oct 3	Cat. 1	No landfall	N/A
Matthew	Oct 8-10	Trop. Storm	Louisiana Coast	N/A
Nicole	Oct 10-11	Trop. Storm	No landfall	N/A
Otto	Nov 30-Dec 2	Trop. Storm	No landfall	N/A

40 to -30°C Shades of gray
-30 to -40°C Yellow
-40 to -50°C Red
-50 to -60°C Pink
-60 to -70°C Turquoise
-70 to -80°C Green
-80 and lower Blue and Magenta

Data Category

Major: Atmosphere

Keywords:

Atmosphere, hurricane, IR satellite, satellite

Data Set Name	2004 Hurricane Season
Data Set Directory Name	2004_ir_hurricane
Data Set Source	NOAA
Data Set Developer	NOAA
Visualization Developer	Mike Biere, NOAA/GSD
Audio	shared/sos/media/audio/CoupeStudios/Music/HurricaneLoop.mp3
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