NASA satellite offers view of tornado outbreak from space

A video released today by NASA, captured by the agency's weather satellites, shows yesterday's deadly tornado-spawning storm from space. The 31-second computer-animated video was created by weather scientists working on the GOES Project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite or GOES-East; the project is collaborative effort between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. As NASA explained in a press statement released today, the video was made by taking the cloud data collected by NASA's GOES infrared satellites and overlays it on a true-color image of Earth's surface compiled with data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) -- an instrument installed on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. The storm featured in NASA's video ripped through much of the South on Sunday and Monday. At least 30 people have been reported dead in the wake of the devastation.