NASA captures rare shot of lightning near Meranti eyewall
Digital Reporter
Friday, September 16, 2016, 8:06 PM -
A NASA weather satellite picked up this striking image of Typhoon Meranti as it hit the Philippines early Wednesday morning.
The image (shown in video above) captured by the Suomi NPP satellite shows Super Typhoon Meranti as it hit the island of Itbayat in the Luzon Strait. In the photo you can see a streak of lightning just atop the eye of the storm.
“The waxing gibbous (93% of full) moon provided quite a bit of illumination for the Day Night Band on VIIRS to observe quite a number of features, including (tropospheric) gravity waves emanating from the very well defined eye, mesovorticies within the eye itself and a lone lightning "streak" near the eyewall itself,” explained the agency on it’s website.
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The image was captured at around (5 a.m. EDT), when Meranti was bringing maximum winds of 287 km/h (155 knots) as it moved south of Taiwan.
Meranti then tracked into Mainland China, making landfall in the southeast late Wednesday.
The typhoon wreaked havoc as it landed in the Fujian Province, causing serious damages to trees as well as water-supply facilities in the province, Reuters reported.
At the peak of the storm, about 2.6 million households were without power.
Thousands of troops were deployed to help with rescue efforts and relief work, according to Reuters.
Meranti made landfall in the Xiang'an District of Xiamen early on Thursday. It is the strongest one hitting the Fujian Province since the local meteorological agency started to keep records in 1949.
