Tropical Storm Ida strengthened briefly to hurricane status twice between November 5 and November 8, 2009. When the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image at 2:00 p.m. Havana time (19:00 UTC) on November 7, Ida was a tropical storm. Ida hovered over the Caribbean Sea, just off the coasts of southeast Mexico and Belize, and southwest of Cuba. The storm threw long tendrils to the east.
Between November 7 and November 9, Ida headed over the Gulf of Mexico. As of noon Central Standard Time, Ida’s eye was some 185 kilometers (115 miles) south-southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River, traveling toward the north-northwest. The storm was expected to change direction toward the northeast over the next 24 hours.
By the time it moved over the Gulf, Ida had left behind a trail of destruction in Central America. The storm spawned floods and landslides in El Salvador, leading to 130 deaths, according to Agence France-Presse.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Michon Scott, NASA Earth Observatory.
