Besides acquiring photo-like images of the surface of Earth, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites can detect the anomalously high temperatures associated with actively burning fires. Using this “hotspot” data, John Nelson of IDV Solutions made a map of major fires in the contiguous 48 United States from 2001 […]
Congratulations to Yiannis Raftopoulos for being the first to correctly identify that our second satellite puzzler was a view of Dudinka, a port city along the Yenisei River in northern Siberia. Raftopoulos submitted his answer just 15 hours and 51 minutes after we posted the image—not quite as fast as Alexandre Manthieu was at solving our […]
One of the first things that caught my eye when I started checking for interesting satellite imagery yesterday was this: an enormous “V” of smoke draped over northern Canada, as seen by the MODIS instrument on the Aqua satellite. The plume was caused by numerous wildfires burning in the Caribou Mountains of northern Alberta. At first […]
Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The second puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section below to tell us what part of the world we’re looking at, when the image was acquired, and what’s happening in the scene. Bonus points if […]
We publish a lot of wildfire imagery on our natural hazards page (particularly after the wildfire season ramped up recently in Colorado and other states in the western U.S.) Most of the imagery is acquired during the day by instruments on polar-orbiting satellites: the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on Aqua and Terra, the Advanced Land […]
On June 29, 2012, a long-lived, fast-moving windstorm blew over the eastern United States. The storm started in northwestern Indiana and, over the next 10 hours, traveled roughly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) toward the East Coast. Wind speeds matched those of an EF-1 tornado in places. The storm uprooted trees, damaged homes, smashed cars, downed […]
