The photo, taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in October 2014, shows Florida's peninsula illuminated at night. As NASA notes, the brightest areas in the photo indicate the most populous areas in the state. Notably, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area, home to 5.6 million people, is the most noticeable blip on the landscape, lighting up the entire southeastern coast of Florida a brilliant white.
Other noticeable cities include the Tampa metro area (2.8 million people), the brightest area on the Gulf Coast, the Orlando metro area (2.3 million people), which lights up a chunk of central Florida and the Jacksonville metro area (1.3 million people) in the far northeastern corner of the state.
More importantly, as you can tell from the bright spots in the photo, most of Florida's nearly 20 million people live along the coast. And even though Florida hasn't had a hurricane make landfall on the state in more than nine years, the risk for a potentially deadly tropical cyclone only increases as more people flock to Florida's coasts.
The most notorious example might just come from Hurricane Andrew, which made landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in the Miami metro area in 1992. When Andrew came ashore in the Homestead, Florida, area it shredded homes and caused an estimated $23 billion in damage, killing 23 people.
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