A Rare Monster Seen from Space

Yemen and Oman are bracing themselves for the landfall of Cyclone Chapala, a huge and powerful hurricane-force storm on the Arabian Sea. This is an extremely rare event, and forecasters are predicting it will dump several years worth of rain onto the normally desert-dry area in just a few days. My Slate colleague Eric Holthaus has an excellent overview of this event. The good folks at Weather Underground are also keeping tabs on it. So are NASA's and NOAA's eyes in space. The cyclone has been ob...