This embedded map above shows before and after Black Marble Nighttime Blue/Yellow Composite (Day/Night Band) false-color images of power outages across Houston, Texas, due to Hurricane Beryl. The images were acquired on July 5 and 9, 2024, by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the joint NASA/NOAA NOAA-20 satellite. The Houston metropolitan area is the large cluster of lights near the center of the image on the Texas coast.
The left (A) side of the map shows the lights of Houston on July 5, a few days before Hurricane Beryl made landfall; the right (B) side shows the city on July 9, the day after the storm made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Swipe the bar back and forth to see the difference in city lights between the two dates.
2.3 million utility customers of CenterPoint Energy (out of 2.6 million total customers) lost power during the storm. Electricity was restored to about 1.1 million customers by the night of July 10. As of Thursday, July 11, more than 1 million utility customers were still without power across Houston, according to the Washington Post.
The Black Marble Nighttime Blue/Yellow Composite (Day/Night Band) is a false-color composite using the VIIRS at-sensor radiance and the brightness temperatures from the M15 band. Data are provided by NASA's VJ146A1 product using NOAA-20 observations.
Originally designed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab and incorporated into NASA research and applications efforts, the resulting false-color scheme shows nighttime city lights in shades of yellow with infrared, nighttime cloud presence in shades of blue. During bright moonlight conditions, moonlight reflected from cloud tops and the land surface may also provide a yellow hue to these features. Comparisons of cloud-free conditions before and after a period of significant change, such as new city growth, disasters, fires, or other factors, may exhibit a change in emitted light (yellows) from those features over time.
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Dataset
VJ146A1G_NRT doi:10.5067/VIIRS/VJ146A1_NRT.002
Reference
Dance, Scott. July 11, 2024. After Beryl, power outages could last a week or more for 350,000 Texans. Washington Post. Accessed July 11, 2024.