When Hurricane Sandy landed historically off the coast of New Jersey on the night of October 29, NASA / NOAA’s Finnish National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) recorded this nocturnal view of the storm. This image, provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a combination of several satellites across North America taken 16 to 18 hours before Sandy landed.

The storm was captured in a special “day-night-band” that detects light at different wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to obscure dim signals such as northern lights, air flare, gas torch, city lights, fires and reflected moonlight. The picture shows the city lights in the southern and central United States.

William Straka, an assistant researcher at the Meteorological Satellite Studies Collaborating Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains that because there was a full moon, cloud lighting was greatest.

“You can see Sandy pulling energy from both Canada and the eastern Atlantic,” Straka said. “Typically, forecasters only use infrared bands at night to view the structure of a storm. However, using new day / night sensor images in addition to heat channels can provide a more complete and unique view of hurricanes at night.”

VIIRS is one of the five instruments of the Finnish nuclear power plant. The mission is the result of a collaboration between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Defense.

On Monday, Oct. 29, at 8 p.m., Hurricane Sandy landed 5 miles (10 km) south of Atlantic City, NJ, near 39 degrees 24 minutes north latitude and 74 degrees 30 minutes west longitude. At the time of landing, Sandy’s maximum continuous winds were close to 80 mph (130 km / h) and it was moving west-northwest at 23 mph (37 km / h). According to the National Hurricane Center, hurricane-force winds extended outward 175 miles (280 km) from downtown and tropical storm winds extended 485 miles (780 km). Sandy’s minimum mean pressure at the time of landing was 946 millibars or 27.93 inches.

The Finnish nuclear power plant was launched on 28 October 2011 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California A year later, the Finnish nuclear power plant has toured the Earth more than 5,000 times and started recovering images and data that provide critical weather and climate measurements of complex Earth systems.

The Finnish nuclear power plant monitors the earth’s surface twice a day, once in daylight and once at night. The nuclear power plant flies 512 miles (824 kilometers) above the surface in orbit and orbits the planet about 14 times a day. The nuclear power plant sends the data once in orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and continuously to local live users.