It seemed like it would be a tropical storm, but in just half a day it became the strongest hurricane to hit the Mexican Pacific coast. The step of Otis It has devastated much of the infrastructure and landscape of the city of Acapulco, in the State of Guerrero, and two weeks later the cyclone’s footprint on the territory is still being measured. This Tuesday, NASA presented several satellite images taken on September 21 and October 31, before and after the devastation, which provide new information about its effects.
“The landscape near the city changes and the vegetation, previously green and lush, looks brown,” the organization explains in the note attached to the illustrations. “Sediment runoff from excess rainfall can still be observed in Tres Palos Lagoon almost a week after the storm.” The photographs were taken by two sensors of the Operational Land Imager (OLI), located on the Landsat 8 and 9 satellites, respectively. “The damage to vegetation in the mountains outside Acapulco is especially notable in these images,” the statement continues: “Trees at high altitudes and on steep slopes are more likely to suffer damage during storms because they are more exposed to high wind speeds. The hurricane exceeded, in this case, 250 kilometers per hour. The official toll of victims amounts to 47 dead and 53 missing.
Professor of Ecology at the University of Puerto Rico Jess Zimmerman has studied the images of the organization and has concluded that the damage is “undoubtedly” due to the passage of the cyclone. In previous investigations he had already verified how other storms had caused similar damage, such as Hurricane María in Puerto Rico in 2017.
NASA has activated the Disaster area of the Applied Earth Sciences program in support of people affected by Hurricane Otis and, as new information becomes available, it will publish new maps and data, open to the public.
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