Drought-induced depletion of groundwater is no longer an issue that’s out of sight, out of mind. Research by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published this week in Science, describes a GPS technique used to measure drought-induced uplift of land in the western United States. The uplift measurements were used, in turn, to calculate the deficit […]
These images compare averaged yearly nitrogen dioxide concentrations over the Ohio River Valley region from 2005 [top] to 2011 [bottom]. Image credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio/T. Schindler Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the NASA Earth Science in the News column published in the May/June issue of The Earth Observer newsletter. You can download the current […]
The answer to the August puzzler — Nagoya and the south-central coast of Japan — was puzzling even to Earth Observatory staff. When we first posted the image on August 26, even we did not know what we were looking at. We had asked our colleagues at the Crew Earth Observations (CEO) office at NASA Johnson Space Center […]
Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The August 2014 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, when the image was acquired, what the image shows, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be a […]
Tidewater glaciers—glaciers that flow from inland mountains all the way into the sea—are perhaps best known for birthing new icebergs in spectacular fashion. As members of James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey team captured in this clip (above) of Ilulissat Glacier in western Greenland, calving events can feature huge chunks of ice tumbling into roiling waters and […]
Since he rocketed to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 29, 2014, American astronaut Reid Wiseman has been enjoying the sights. He has built an active following on Twitter by sharing photographs of a world he is seeing from space for the first time. Like many first-timers in space, he is also discovering some […]
We published a photograph of a lone turquoise melt pond as our Image of the Day on August 2, 2014. Although that was one of the largest that scientists participating in the 2014 MABEL campaign saw, it certainly wasn’t the only one. In fact, that melt pond had plenty of company—and we had no shortage […]
Over four missions, astronaut Carl Walz logged 231 days in space. Before the launch of the International Space Station resupply Orb-2 mission from Wallops Island, Virginia, in July 2014, he described a few of views of Earth from space that he remembers best. Walz is now Vice President of Human Space Flight Operations at Orbital, […]
Palettes aren’t the only important decision when visualizing data with color: you also need to consider scaling. Not only is the choice of start and end points (the lowest and highest values) critical, but the way intermediate values are stretched between them.
