SALT LAKE CITY — The National Weather Service tweeted a clip on Tuesday of a hurricane passing through the West Coast at the same time that a total solar eclipse stretched across South America.
The clip, which you can see below, shows the Category 4 hurricane building near the Baja California peninsula. The clip captured the solar eclipse pass at the exact same time as the storm.
“Not too often you catch a Category 4 hurricane and a solar eclipse occurring in the same satellite loop,” the National Weather Service said in the tweet including the clip.
Hurricane Barbara: The image shows Hurricane Barbara moving through the West Coast. It remains about 1,000 miles away from the southern tip of Baja California, according to the National Hurricane Center.
"It is not a threat to any landmass in the next several days," CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller told CNN. "But it did rapidly intensify [Monday and Tuesday] into a powerful Category 4 with 140-mile-per-hour winds." Miller said the hurricane will move into the open ocean.
According to The Washington Post, forecasters and computer models didn’t predict the storm to intensify so quickly. Low wind shear and warm ocean temperatures, both of which are ideal characteristics for hurricanes, caused the storm to grow quickly.