Category 5 Hurricane Rick

Hurricane Rick was a Category 5 storm on October 18, 2009, near the time when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image. Several hundred kilometers southwest of Baja California, the storm had winds of 160 miles per hour (260 kilometers per hour), down from an estimated 180 mph (290 km/h) the previous evening at 8:00 p.m. As of 8:00 a.m. PDT on October 19, Rick was predicted to move in a northeastward arc, perhaps grazing Cabo San Lucas on the tip of the peninsula before making landfall as a weakened storm in Mexico between Wednesday and Thursday.