Yet another tropical cyclone was headed for Mozambique in February 2021, less than a month after Tropical Cyclone Eloise brought widespread damage and severe flooding to southeastern Africa.
The latest storm, Tropical Cyclone Guambe, is visible in this image acquired in the early afternoon on February 19, 2021, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Around the time of this image, the storm had maximum sustained winds of about 85 knots (100 miles/155 kilometers per hour)—equivalent to a category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.
Guambe is the fourth tropical cyclone of the 2020–2021 South Indian Ocean season, which runs from November through April. Some parts of Mozambique are still recovering from the destruction caused by Tropical Cyclone Idai in March 2019.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.
