15 Scary Hurricane Harvey GIFs That Warn It’s Getting Closer & Closer To Land

Sure, it just looks like a pretty sunset — but it was this smooth sunset cruise that helped the weather service upgrade the storm to a Category 2 hurricane.

Radar images are one thing — views from the space station are something totally different. When you see that the clouds from the storm take up basically the station's entire view of the Earth, it really looks serious.

The sheer number of emergency personnel who will be on hand should make anyone think twice about staying anywhere near the hurricane's path.

Corpus Christi is right in the path of the storm, so they're not taking any chances. They haven't ordered a full evacuation of the city, but the most vulnerable people are being taken to safer ground — and by most vulnerable, I mean the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit in the city's main hospital.

It doesn't look pleasant to be stuck in that line of traffic, but getting stuck in traffic is better than getting stuck in a flooded house.

You might just see bunch of clouds moving in formation, but this weatherman sees a well-defined eye and a lot of open water for the storm to pick up steam.

It's not just the winds and rain that could prove dangerous — it's the storm surge, and the National Weather Service has issued a warning about it for the first time.

This clip shows it all — the extreme pinks and reds in the first image, and the menacing clouds moving ever so slowly closer to the coast in the second.

The maps often just show you the coastline without any markers of where people actually live, but here you can see how close it's going to get to Corpus Christi, a city of over 325,000, and Port Lavaca, which another 12,000 call home. If you know your Texas geography, then you know that both of those are practically villages compared to the huge metropolis only miles away: Houston, population 2.3 million.

While it's not exactly pleasant to watch a meteorologist in front of a green screen of a house flooding, it's important to know what exactly the storm surge is capable of doing. She successfully makes the point that there are few forces on Earth as powerful as water that has nowhere else to go.

If you needed any more convincing that this storm is huge, well, here's the evidence.

Hurricanes, particularly big ones like Hurricane Harvey, aren't generally contained to a small area. That may seem like an obvious thing to say, but I'm specifically talking about the weather disturbances and heavy rain that can come even outside of the area that the storm itself is technically hitting. If you're in south Texas at all, at the very least you're going to need a good umbrella this weekend.

This was shot right near Port Lavaca, and you can already see how fast the waves are moving in. Hopefully, the people watching the waves in the video have already gotten themselves safely out of the area.

You've probably heard various meteorologists talking about how the storm could upgrade as it moves over the open water, and watching the radar get progressively redder and redder is just another way of imagining that.

If you grew up anywhere along the Atlantic coast or the Gulf of Mexico, you know a thing or two about hurricanes. And if you know anything about hurricanes, you know that the eye is where there's a moment of calm — and this is what it looks like inside the eye of Hurricane Harvey. The plane looks quite steady — perhaps it's best not to imagine the rough winds it'll face as soon as it goes into the area right around the eye, where the winds are the strongest.

Hurricane Harvey's projected landfall is now less that 24 hours away, and unless it somehow weakens, this is going to be a big deal. If you see your town anywhere near those red sections on the radar, you're going to want to get out as soon as you possibly can.