If you think we’ve been having some unpredictable weather here in Cape Town, just be grateful you aren’t anywhere near the mid-Atlantic coast and the Carolinas in the USA.

Hurricane Florence, a monster of a storm, is barrelling towards the States causing panic across the country, and more than a million people have been evacuated in preparation for landfall.

According to Mashable, if Florence hits North Carolina as a Category four storm, it will be the strongest storm to make landfall in the state since Hurricane Hazel in 1954.

As it stands, Florence is now a Category two hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 177 km/h.

It’s also massive, as you can see from satellite images of the storm that are nothing short of terrifying.

Astronauts at the International Space Station […] struggled to fit the enormous storm into one frame.

“We could only capture her with a super wide-angle lens from the Space Station, 400 km directly above the eye,” astronaut Alexander Gerst tweeted on Wednesday. “Get prepared on the East Coast, this is a no-kidding nightmare coming for you.”

So…nobody panic?

North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland have declared a state of emergency in anticipation of the storm.

Check it out below – scary stuff.

[source:mashable]