Every day we bring you a different view of Earth, as only NASA can see it…from high above, and usually from space. One of our colleagues has also been working since 2000 to bring you breathtaking views of Earth…albeit, from a perspective that’s a bit closer to the ground. Together with a few professional helpers […]
This week’s Earth Indicator is 4 million…as in 4 million square kilometers. It’s a number that scientists studying sea ice never thought they would see. Every year, the sea ice at the top of our planet shrinks and grows with the seasons. But because ocean water lags behind the atmosphere in warming up and cooling […]
NASA Earth Observatory writer Adam Voiland spoke with Columbia University climatologist Richard Seager about the widespread drought currently affecting North America. The current dry spell has been called a “flash drought.” Has it really come on that quickly or as a surprise? No, I wouldn’t say it has been a surprise to those of […]
Read our recent Image of the Day to find out more about the Yanqi Basin, the answer to August’s puzzler. Congratulations to Yiannis Raftopoulos for being the first to identify the location. We posted the mystery image on Monday at 6:17 p.m. and on our social media accounts on Tuesday morning. Within minutes of appearing […]
Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The third 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 […]
Is that a three omicron? Nope. Three, rho? Strike two. Our latest Earth Indicator is three-sigma. In Greek, sigma (σ) is the 18th letter of the alphabet. In statistics, it’s a symbol for standard deviation, a measure of how spread out a set of data points are from the average (which is often called the […]
Earlier this week, as India endured the worst blackout in its history, many readers and members of the media asked us to show the vast country without lights. Just a few weeks ago, Earth Observatory showed the world what the Mid-Atlantic United States looked like before and after a massive storm-induced blackout. (We also showed […]
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 […]
