Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Gulf Coast of Texas as a Category 4 hurricane on the night of August 25, 2017. It then stalled over southeastern Texas as a tropical storm and continued to creep northeast over Louisiana.

What made Harvey an unusually devastating storm was its rain. Extraordinary rain totals were recorded at several locations. On August 30, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a rainfall total of 51.88 inches at Cedar Bayou and FM Road No. 1942, just east of Houston.

These four images show Harvey’s development over the Gulf of Mexico and its movement across Texas. The images were created using NASA-generated Surface Reflectance data products from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), one of the instruments on the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite. VIIRS provides daily global coverage at multiple resolutions. Land S-NPP NASA VIIRS data products are made available by the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC) and can be accessed using NASA’s Earthdata Search or the USGS’ EarthExplorer.