A NASA satellite view of the Florida Panhandle at night shows what Hurricane Isaias did to the lights. Around Pensacola and Destin, and along the highway between them, the glow is clearly thinner than it was in the summer.
The images come from NASA's Black Marble HD product, which uses the day-night band on the NOAA-20 satellite's VIIRS instrument to detect light at night. The left image is a composite of August 2026 data standing in for normal conditions. The right one shows October 11, after most of the storm's clouds had cleared.
NASA says the pattern around Pensacola and the U.S. Route 98 corridor toward Destin suggests widespread power outages. That is an inference from lost light, not a count of customers without power.
What the storm did
Isaias became the first hurricane of a quiet 2026 Atlantic season on October 8. It made landfall near Destin on the evening of October 9 as a Category 2 storm with maximum sustained winds of 105 miles per hour (170 km/h).
The National Weather Service reported gusts above 100 mph (161 km/h) along a corridor west of the center, including a preliminary 117 mph (188 km/h) gust in Oriole Beach. Heavy rain and flash flooding hit parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, and winds toppled trees and downed power lines. The biggest drops in light sat west of the eye, where those strongest winds overlapped.
How the images were made
The team adjusted the data for landscape changes, the atmosphere and the phase of the Moon, and filtered out stray light that does not come from electric lights. Gray hash-marked areas show where clouds blocked the sensor.
Ranjay Shrestha of the Black Marble team said the HD version lets researchers see changes "at a much finer spatial scale" than standard Black Marble imagery.
What we don't know yet
The NASA page does not say how many customers lost power, how long outages lasted, or how much has been restored since October 11. Utility figures would fill that gap.
This story does not yet include outage counts or restoration timelines from the utilities serving Pensacola and Destin, or accounts from residents, businesses and local emergency officials. Those are the next reporting steps, and we will add them once we have them confirmed.
Sources
- 1.Isaias Dims the Gulf Coast - NASA Science · NASA Science
Reported by the WattsUpNext desk from the sources linked below. Spot an error? Tell us at corrections@wattsupnext.com.
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