NASA published a new analysis October 16 showing how nighttime lighting changed along the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Isaias. The review uses Black Marble HD satellite products to examine areas around Pensacola and the coastal corridor toward Destin.

The analysis compares typical lighting in an August composite with October 11 observations. Large reductions in visible nighttime lights suggest widespread power disruption after the storm’s October 9 landfall.

Some lights had returned by October 12, and NASA says the regional lighting pattern looked similar to pre-storm conditions by October 14. That observation does not prove that every individual customer had electricity restored.

The product uses the NOAA-20 satellite’s day-night sensor, with processing to account for atmospheric conditions, landscape effects and moonlight. Cloud-obscured locations cannot be interpreted in the same way as clear observations.

Nighttime imagery complements utility and ground-based reports rather than replacing them. The publication is a new assessment of earlier observations, not a claim that the hurricane made landfall today or that satellite brightness alone identifies the cause of every outage.