– Each month, Earth Observatory offers up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The October 2013 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, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. […]
Fourteen years ago, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus on Landsat 7 acquired these images of mud trails off the coast of Louisiana. They were caused by bottom trawling in the Gulf of Mexico, a fishing technique that involves dragging large nets across the sea floor. Bottom trawling is an efficient way to scoop up shrimp […]
Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 square km (13,200 square miles)—for a total of 13,690,000 square km (5,290,000 square miles) per day. An area about […]
While most of NASA went dark during the government shutdown, life went on at the International Space Station. Throughout October, astronauts Karen Nyberg, Mike Hopkins, and Luca Parmitano sent a steady stream of tweets back to Earth. The most eye-popping of the bunch came from Hopkins, who tweeted this on October 10, 2013: “Saw something […]
We’re sorry, but we will not be posting updates to this blog during the government shutdown. Also, all public NASA activities and events are cancelled or postponed until further notice. Rest assured that we will be back as soon as possible! We hope that you will stick with us and we promise more great imagery […]
These key science points were published on September 27, 2013, as “headline statements” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as part of the organization’s fifth assessment report. Background links provided by Earth Observatory. +Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades […]
As category 4 Super Typhoon Usagi churned toward Taiwan on September 19, 2013, a satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above used a radar instrument to map the storm’s inner structure. The instrument on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) observed two tall complexes of rain clouds called hot towers in the inner eyewall, a sign that Usagi was a […]
Congratulations to Felix Bossert for being the quickest to solve the September puzzler. The answer is the Chara Sands. See the Image of the Day that published on September 21, 2013, for a second image and details about the area. Also congratulations to Robert Emberson for providing interesting details about the geologic history of the […]
Drew Skau and I have received a few comments on Subtleties of Color that deserve to be included. (By the way, don’t be shy. You can leave a comment here or at visual.ly) Naomi B. Robbins demonstrated that the standard land cover classification palette fails for color-deficient viewers. She also pointed out that “color-deficient” is […]
Each month, Earth Observatory offers up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The September 2013 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, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your […]
