Space Station Videos Capture Tropical Storm Hilary, Wildfires on West Coast

Wildfires, tropical storms and earthquakes—North America has faced a lot over the past few weeks. While we endure these natural disasters here on the ground, have you ever stopped to wonder what they might look like from space?

The International Space Station orbits the Earth 16 times a day. For much of this orbit, external cameras mounted on the space station stream live footage of the planet below, capturing large scale atmospheric events, like hurricanes and wildfires.

Most of us don’t have time to keep an eye on this stream every day and might miss some of the dramatic flybys. But thanks to Liam Kennedy of ISS-Above, these moments have been captured and shared in bite sized chunks to social media.

On August 18, one day after Tropical Storm Hilary was upgraded to hurricane status, the ISS flew by the swirling storm.

“The Space Station passed some distance to the east of Hurricane Hilary earlier today—and one of the CRONUS flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center did the best job of pointing one of the cameras to show the storm as it approaches Baja, Mexico,” ISS Above said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “It’s a bit obscured by the station structure but we can nevertheless see just how huge the storm is.”

In the footage, swathes of spiralling white clouds can be seen through the lens.

Tropical Storm Hilary made landfall in southern California on Sunday afternoon, bringing with it record-breaking rainfall and “life-threatening flooding,” as reported by the National Weather Service.

Parts of California have seen more than 350 percent of the average monthly rain fall to date. Remnants of the storm are now moving over the northern Rockies, but California is still seeing unusually wet weather in the storm’s wake.

Two days after filming Storm Hilary, the ISS flew over British Columbia, Canada. This time, a gray blanket of smog hung over the landscape below as wildfire and smoke spread across the province.

Wildfires have scorched through large areas of British Columbia and Canada’s Northwest Territories, sending plumes of smoke across the northwestern United States. In the year to date, wildfires have burned over 14 million hectares of land, around 10 times that of the previous year. Thousands of homes have been evacuated and a state of emergency was declared last week by British Columbia’s minister of public safety and solicitor general, Mike Farnworth.

The ISS is visible to the naked eye—it’s the third-brightest object in the sky (after the Sun and Moon) and is easy to spot if you know when to look up. You can either follow NASA’s live tracking maps or use the ISS-Above device, which tracks the station and gives you live updates and information about each pass.