In mid-September 2018, astronauts on the International Space Station photographed Hurricane Florence as it closed in on the Carolinas. The best-known images came from German astronaut Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency and NASA astronaut Richard “Ricky” Arnold, who shot the storm from roughly 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) up through the station's windows. Gerst's set is dated 12 September 2018, two days before landfall.
Gerst shared the pictures with a blunt warning to people on the coast:
“Watch out, America! This is a no-kidding nightmare coming for you.” (Alexander Gerst on Twitter, 12 September 2018)
At that moment Florence was a major hurricane over the open Atlantic. It had peaked as a Category 4 storm with winds near 150 mph on 11 September, then weakened before reaching land. It came ashore near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, on the morning of 14 September as a Category 1 hurricane. The wind category fell, but the danger did not: the storm crawled inland and dropped record rain. Below, each photograph is explained with what it shows and what the storm went on to do.
Alexander Gerst's wide views of the storm
Gerst was on his second long-duration mission, called Horizons, and was preparing to take command of the station. He reportedly described the storm as so large that only a super-wide-angle lens could fit it into one frame.
Seen through one of the station's windows, Florence fills almost the entire visible disc of Earth. A solar array runs down the left of the frame and the Canadarm2 robotic arm reaches across the right. The clear, round eye near the centre is the mark of a mature, well-organised hurricane.
This view through the station's Cupola looks nearly straight down into the storm. The spiral rainbands curl tightly into the centre, and the dark eye is surrounded by a ring of bright, towering cloud known as the eyewall, where the strongest winds blow. Images like this help explain why forecasters were alarmed: the structure was symmetrical and intense.
Close-ups of the eye
Gerst also used a long telephoto lens to zoom in on the centre of the hurricane, producing a set of pictures that look almost like aerial views of a crater.
Zoomed in, the eye appears as a deep, clear funnel ringed by bright cloud. Inside the eye, air sinks and warms, which is why the sky there can be calm and partly clear while the surrounding eyewall holds the storm's most violent winds.
A tighter crop shows the sloping walls of the eye stepping down toward the ocean. The layered cloud on the inner wall, sometimes called a stadium effect, forms because the eyewall leans outward with height. Meteorologists read that kind of structure as a sign of a strong storm.
This frame looks into the eye at an angle, with low clouds swirling at the bottom and the blue of the sea showing through gaps. ESA titled its version of this view “Looking through Hurricane Florence eye.” It is one of the rare chances most of us will get to see the inside of a hurricane without flying into one.
Ricky Arnold's photographs
Arnold, a former science teacher, followed Florence for several days as it crossed the Atlantic. The station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes, so the crew passed over the storm repeatedly and could watch it change.
An oblique view shows Florence's full spiral with the curve of the horizon behind it. Arnold's oblique shots make the storm's size easier to grasp than a straight-down satellite image, because they show it against the thin blue line of the atmosphere.
With the station's robotic arm in the foreground, the hurricane's eye sits near the centre of a vast cloud shield. Florence's tropical-storm-force winds spread over a wide area, and contemporary reports described the cloud mass as hundreds of miles across.
A crowded Atlantic in September 2018
Florence was not alone. In the same period the crew could also see Hurricane Helene and Tropical Storm Isaac in the Atlantic, part of an unusually busy peak to the season. (This Helene is the 2018 storm that stayed over the eastern Atlantic, not the destructive 2024 hurricane of the same name.)
Here the storm spreads out beneath the station's arm and solar panels, its rainbands trailing far from the centre. Feeder bands like these can carry heavy rain and isolated tornadoes well ahead of the eye; Florence went on to produce dozens of tornadoes in the Carolinas and Virginia.
A spacecraft docked to the station frames the lower right corner as the eye passes below. Docked vehicles such as cargo and crew capsules often appear in crew photos because the station's windows face in fixed directions.
In this wider, flatter view the storm looks less organised, with its central dense overcast spread beneath the horizon. Hurricanes can change appearance from orbit within hours as their cloud tops and eyes fill in or clear out, which is why the date and time of each image matter.
NASA published this image on its Flickr account under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). It shows the hurricane stretching toward the horizon, with a solar array at the edge of the frame.
What happened after the photographs
Florence's slow movement turned it into a flood disaster. According to the National Hurricane Center's final report, rainfall near Elizabethtown, North Carolina, reached 35.93 inches, a state record for a tropical cyclone, and Loris set a South Carolina record with 23.63 inches. Storm surge flooded communities along the Neuse River, including New Bern.
The NHC counted 22 direct deaths and 30 indirect deaths, and estimated damage at about $24 billion. Roughly 1.1 million customers lost power. The World Meteorological Organization retired the name Florence in 2019.
The lesson forecasters drew is now part of standard hurricane messaging: the Saffir-Simpson category measures wind only. A weaker, slower storm can be far deadlier through rain and surge than its number suggests.
Watching Florence from space on video
NASA also recorded video of Florence from external cameras on the station, showing the eye passing beneath as the outpost moved along its orbit.
Photographs from orbit do not replace satellites, radar or hurricane hunter aircraft, which provide the measurements behind forecasts. What astronauts add is a human perspective: a sense of scale and form that helps people on the ground understand why warnings deserve to be taken seriously.
Sources: Photos by Alexander Gerst (ESA) and Richard “Ricky” Arnold (NASA). ESA, Hurricane Florence image gallery; Alexander Gerst on Twitter; NASA on Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0); National Hurricane Center, Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Florence; Wikipedia, Hurricane Florence.
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