NASA Image Shows Powerful Cyclone That Injured 700 People

The immense power of the category 5 storm Cyclone Mocha was snapped from space by a NASA satellite as it approached Myanmar and Bangladesh, where it would wreak havoc across the countries.

The image was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite on May 14, just as the storm was about to make landfall.

The cyclone reached wind speeds of up to 175 miles per hour over the ocean, and around 130 mph as it hit the port city of Sittwe, Myanmar's Meteorological Department reported. These powerful winds battered the surrounding towns, causing powerful storm surges and flooding of up to 5 feet, and led to 700 people being injured. Six people have reportedly died, with hundreds more feared dead.

Thousands of people were evacuated across both countries, including 750,000 in Bangladesh and tens of thousands in Myanmar, which may have helped reduce casualties from the disaster.

Cyclones are enormous, rotating storms that form over the ocean. They are the same type of storm as hurricanes or typhoons but are named based on where they form. Hurricanes develop over the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific, while cyclones form over the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. Typhoons form in the Northwest Pacific, according to the World Meteorological Institution.

Storms like these are defined by the power of their winds and are ranked into categories ranging from 1 to 5. Category 5 storms have wind speeds over 157 mph, while category 4 storms measure wind speeds between 130 and 156 mph. Therefore, Cyclone Mocha was category 5 over the ocean at its peak speed but was a category 4 storm by the time it made landfall.

"There are a few main environmental factors that influence how powerful a storm can get. The most popular factor is the temperature of the ocean water beneath the storm," Sam Lillo, a forecast engineer at DTN Weather, previously told Newsweek.

"Wind blowing over water causes an exchange of moisture into the atmosphere, encouraging the growth of deep clouds and heating that intensifies low pressure at the surface, ultimately strengthening the winds and furthering this feedback loop. The warmer the water is, the more moisture and heat that can fuel the storm, and the stronger this feedback process becomes," he said.

Cyclone Mocha strengthened rapidly as it crossed the warm waters in the Bay of Bengal, gaining energy and power due to the lower levels of vertical wind shear. When it made landfall in Myanmar, it may even have been "one of the strongest cyclones on record in the country," according to a United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs update on May 14.

Cyclone Nargis, which hit Myanmar in May 2008, was one of the country's worst natural disasters, killing 140,000 people.

Factors that slow down a tropical storm include wind shear and drier air entering the storm, reducing the growth of the clouds.

"Wind shear can encourage dry air entrainment, and can also tilt, displace, and tear apart the vortex of the storm causing it to weaken. Finally, there is land interaction, which can cut off the fuel source for the storm, and introduce friction slowing the winds. Computer models account for all of these factors in determining how strong a tropical storm will get," Lillo said.

The storm rapidly lessened in power as it moved over the land, losing the fuel provided by the warm sea air.

It is thought that hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons will be impacted by climate change, becoming more powerful and frequent due to increasing atmospheric temperatures.

"The science on how hurricanes will change in the future is fairly complex and not entirely settled, but a few things are generally accepted: 1) there might not be more hurricanes overall, but those that do form will tend to be more intense both in terms of the strength of their winds and the amount of rainfall that they produce; 2) because of this intensification and also due to some potential changes in the directions that storms tend to move, it is probable that there will be more Category 4 and 5 storms hitting the U.S.," Daniel B. Wright, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Hydroclimate Extremes Research Group, told Newsweek in November.

"A recent study by collaborators of mine at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab recently estimated that the number of Category 4 and 5 storms might be four times the current average by the end of the century," he said.

"The increases in rainfall that come from a warmer atmosphere will also be really important," Wright said. "Rain from hurricanes and the freshwater flooding that it causes isn't necessarily the first thing many people think of related to hurricanes, but it was the main story for Hurricane Harvey (the second-most damaging storm in U.S. history) and has historically been a bigger killer than hurricane winds and waves."

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