Storm responsible for rare Christmas tornadoes caught by NASA, NOAA satellites

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An unexpected and unwelcomed holiday surprise arrived for the people of Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana on Christmas week, and as the storm took shape, NASA and US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) probes kept an eye on the weather system. (Watch here: http://new.www.redorbit.com/news/video/space_2/1113305206/noaa-goes-east-satellite-shows-storm-systems-122614/)
The storm system, which generated tornados in those southern states on Tuesday, was tracked by the NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellites, while the space agency’s own RapidScat instrument captured wind-related data from its position on board the International Space Station (ISS), NASA explained.
RapidScat spotted high winds in the Gulf of Mexico while Mississippi was experiencing tornadoes late Tuesday, and one image captured by the instrument showed winds travelling as fast as 67.1 miles per hour (30 meters per second) off the southeastern coast of Texas.
As the storm system moved east early Wednesday morning, it detected sustained winds of approximately the same strength near south central Louisiana and in Alabama. In addition, NASA created animated footage of visible and infrared satellite data from the NOAA GOES-East satellite that showed how the severe weather system developed and moved.
“To create the images and the video, NASA/NOAA’s GOES Project takes the cloud data from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite and overlays it on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites,” the agency explained. “Together, those data created the entire picture of the storm systems and show their movement.”
“Coupled with local weather observations, soundings, and computer models, data from satellites like NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite or GOES-East (also known as GOES-13) gives forecasters information about developing weather situations,” NASA added. “In real-time, the NOAA’s GOES-East satellite data in animated form showed forecasters how the area of severe weather was developing and moving.”
The GOES-East satellite maintains a fixed orbit in space, collecting visible and infrared imagery of weather patterns over the eastern US and the Atlantic Ocean. While the satellite is operated by the NOAA, the joint NASA/NOAA’s GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland developed the animation covering the severe weather period.
In the days and weeks leading up to Christmas, NASA also shared video of a solar flare, as well as Christmas lights has observed from a satellite, according to Newsweek.  The X1.8-class flare (X-indicating that it was one of the most intense types of solar flare) was captured last Friday by Solar Dynamics Observatory, and posted online under the name “Holiday Lights on the Sun.”
As for the map of Christmas lights as they appear from space, it was compiled using the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite and revealed that the decorations help make evening lights in the US between 20 percent and 50 percent brighter between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day when compared to the rest of the year.
“When we started looking at the data at night over the United States, we were expecting to see a lot of stability in the nighttime lights,” explained Miguel Román, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We were really surprised to see this vibrant increase in activity during the holidays, particularly around the areas in the suburbs where you have a lot of single-family homes with a lot of yard space to put in lights.”
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