Tropical Storm Fay

Credit: Jeff Schmaltz; MODIS team; NASA, Posted on: Wednesday, 20 August 2008, 06:27 CDT Download full size image

Tropical Storm Fay came ashore in Florida early in the morning on August 19, 2008, a day after striking the Florida Key Islands. Hurricane warnings which had been in place on August 18 were cancelled after Fay failed to reach minimal hurricane status as previous predicted. However, with 95 kilometer per hour winds (60 miles per hour) and heavy rain, Fay remained a serious storm. There were a number of reports of tornadoes spawned by the storm. Earlier, the storm system had travelled the length of Hispaniola, bringing heavy rains and winds to the Dominican Republic and Haiti before travelling along Cuba’s southern coast. In the Dominican Republic, the national Emergency Operations Center (Spanish Language) reported five fatalities from the storm.

The MODIS on the Aqua satellite captured this image of the storm at 2:50 p.m. local time (18:50 UTC) on August 18. Fay had crossed through central Cuba and was most of the way across the Florida Straits when MODIS obtained this data. The storm system appears as an organized ball of spiraling clouds, but it lacks the central eye usually associated with a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center was reporting sustained winds in the storm system of 95 kilometers per hour (60 miles per hour). Tides were around two to four feet higher than normal from storm surge, and rainfall totals of four to eight inches of rain (ten to twenty centimeters) of rain through central Cuba were being forecast from the storm, which reports of local patches of heavier rain in places.

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