2019 in photos: wrapping up the year

Today, we look back at some of the weather events that took place in 2019 with a round-up of the most impressive satellite images we gathered from space.

The Indian Ocean cyclone season was quite eventful this year, starting off in February with the rise of tropical cyclones Gelena and Funani in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar.

These were closely followed in March by Tropical Cyclone Idai over Madagascar, that reached category 3 in mid-March.

The region didn’t quiet down in April or May with tropical cyclones Lorna and Kenneth near Mauritius and Madagascar and Tropical Cyclone Fani making landfall over India.

The Indian Ocean region finally got some rest in June while Europe had some significant storms such as storm Miguel that hit the south-west.

On top of this, July was an eventful month with storms bringing rain showers over the south of Europe as well.

Both July and August were very hot months that produced many wildfires in multiple parts of the world. In the images selected, we can see smoke plumes coming from wildfires in Central Russia and later in Gran Canaria respectively.

On top of this, the end of August brought Hurricane Dorian to the Caribbean Sea, causing a lot of damage to the Bahamas.

The second part of the year saw some other tropical cyclones, one of which was Hikaa, east of Oman in September followed by hurricane Lorenzo that developed next to the Azores.

October followed with Super Typhoon Hagibis hitting Japan. Hagibis is considered the most devastating typhoon to hit the Kanto region of Japan since Typhoon Ida in 1958. It reached category 5 with winds of 120 mph and kept up this intensity for 72 hours, slowly fading afterwards.

One of the most dramatic images in November was this picture of the smoke plumes generated by the New South Wales wildfires that are still causing havoc in Australia.

On top of this, November was also the month of Tropical Cyclone Bualoi and Tropical Cyclone Halong in the Western Pacific. Halong also reached the title of super typhoon, becoming a category 5 storm on November 5. It was the strongest typhoon of the season and also the strongest tropical cyclone worldwide in 2019.

Finally, December was again an active month for the Indian Ocean with this image of three tropical cyclones happening at the same time: Belna, Pawan and Ambali.

As an end of year treat, here are some images of space from Earth instead, snapped by our very own astronomy club (credits: Carsten Schaefer) over multiple outings during the year.

The first one is a picture of the lunar eclipse that brought us the super moon in January.

The last two images represent the Milky Way and the Swan Nebula surrounded by other H II regions respectively.