Hurricane Zeta makes landfall on the Gulf Coast

Hurricane Zeta makes landfall on the Gulf Coast. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory shows Hurricane Zeta, which was the fifth tropical storm in 2020 to make landfall in Louisiana. Zeta is also the 11th named storm to impact the continental United States this year. 

According to NASA, this is only the sixth time in 170 years that a hurricane has come ashore in the U.S. on or after October 28.

The eye of the Category 2 storm passed over New Orleans on Wednesday night at roughly 7:30 p.m. with wind gusts of up to 110 miles per hour.

More than 700,000 power outages have been reported across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, as well as one fatality related to a downed power line. Hurricane Zeta makes landfall on the Gulf Coast

According to CNN, a hurricane warning is in effect for nearly five million people, but the storm will impact a much larger part of the Southeast over the next 24 to 36 hours.

The image was captured on the morning of October 28, 2020 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. 

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer