To understand why Hurricane Erin may bring life-threatening storm surges and heavy rain to the United States this week without ever making landfall, take a look at the video above.
A camera attached to the International Space Station, which typically orbits the Earth at an altitude of at least 200 miles, captured the video on Wednesday as the storm moved north of the Caribbean in a swirl of clouds that blotted out the land.
Erin is “unusually large” and ranks among the largest hurricanes ever in the Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center said on Wednesday. Specifically, it was 530 miles across, nearly as wide as Montana. A typical hurricane is about 300 miles wide.
The National Hurricane Center has warned that its own forecasts, which show the hurricane moving further into the ocean away from the U.S., may underestimate the strength of winds that could reach the East Coast, even as the storm’s center remains offshore.
It’s already clear that the hurricane threatens parts of the East Coast with destructive surf, rip currents, coastal erosion and beach flooding. The storm is forecast to remain a hurricane through the weekend, meaning it will have maximum sustained winds of at least 74 miles per hour.
Erin brushed North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Wednesday, bringing storm surges that forced the closure of a crucial highway. Tropical storm conditions are forecast for the Outer Banks and the Virginia coast on Thursday, along with some rain.
The International Space Station’s video did not clearly show where Hurricane Erin was on the earth’s surface. But a photo released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday showed that the storm was squarely in the Atlantic.
The photo showed scattered clouds on Erin’s outer edges near the Florida coast, parts of which were under tropical storm and high surf warnings on Wednesday night.
A graphic released by the Weather Service early Thursday showed how the winds inside those swirling clouds were not all moving at the same speed.
The storm’s fast-spinning core, shown in red below, had hurricane-force winds of about 105 m.p.h. Surrounding that was a much larger band, shown in yellow, of tropical storm-force winds — a designation for winds of 39 to 73 m.p.h.
The outer band was brushing a patch of North Carolina coast that was under a tropical storm warning.
Judson Jones and Sachi Kitajima Mulkey contributed reporting.
Francesca Regalado is a Times reporter covering breaking news.
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