Hurricanes Irma and Andrew

By Eric Holthaus
7 September 2017(Grist) – The last Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the United States was Andrew, which lashed South Florida with wind gusts of up to 177 miles per hour in 1992. It caused immense devastation and forever changed Florida’s approach to hurricanes.Twenty-five years later, we have Hurricane Irma — a storm that could be even worse.The above GIF, assembled from GOES satellite data by Joel Nihlean, combines images of the two hurricanes to compare them side-by-side to scale. Not only is Irma more powerful, it’s also much larger: One recent estimate showed that Irma packs more than five times Andrew’s destructive potential. Its hurricane-force winds cover an area roughly the size of Massachusetts. [more]

Here’s why Irma is a monster hurricane, in one GIF.