Hurricane Sandy inundated the U.S. East Coast with surging floods and brought damaging winds over New York City on Monday, and satellites captured astonishing imagery of the cyclone, which stretched 1,000 miles across at the time of landfall.
Meteorologists designated the superstorm a post-tropical cyclone as it passed near Atlantic City, N.J., with sustained winds of 85 mph.
NOAA's GOES 14 weather satellite, positioned in geostationary orbit 22,300 miles over the equator, collected an image of Hurricane Sandy every minute as it tracked from the Caribbean Sea up the East Coast. This video shows GOES 14's "super rapid scan" imagery from dawn to dusk Oct. 29 in a time lapse format. Credit: NASA/NOAA
An imaging spectroradiometer on NASA's Terra Earth-observing satellite acquired this image of Hurricane Sandy at 12 p.m. EDT on Oct. 28, when the storm packed winds of 75 mph southeast of Cape Hatteras, N.C. Credit: NASA/Goddard/MODIS Rapid Response Team
The VIIRS instrument - or the visible infrared imaging radiometer suite - on the Suomi NPP satellite collected this image of Hurricane Sandy at 2:11 a.m. EDT on Oct. 29. The cloud tops of the storm were illuminated by the full moon, and city lights are visible in South Carolina and North Carolina. Credit: NASA/NOAA
A scan from the scatterometer payload on Europe's MetOp B satellite, which launched last month, shows swirling winds at the center of Hurricane Sandy at 11:30 a.m. EDT on Oct. 29. Credit: Eumetsat/KNMI
The precipitation radar on the joint U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite provided this 3D view inside the core of Hurricane Sandy. Data for this image were collected at 2:20 p.m. EDT on Oct. 28. Credit: Owen Kelly/NASA
The VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP weather satellite returned this view of Hurricane Sandy at 1:35 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29 as the storm was about 175 miles south-southeast of New York City. Credit: NASA/NOAA
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, or AIRS, instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft captured this infrared image of Hurricane Sandy, another weather front to the west and cold air coming down from Canada at 2:17 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29. The hurricane center is the darkest purple area in the Atlantic just to the east of the New Jersey coast, reflecting Sandy's areas of heaviest rainfall. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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