Around 9:20 a.m. local time on February 15, 2013, a blazing mass of rock from space—a meteor—streaked across the sky over the Ural Mountains in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. The burning mass produced a loud sonic boom and shock wave that blew out windows in multiple cities and towns. Russian media outlets are reporting hundreds of injuries, most minor, […]
In digging for news on the nor’easter that whacked New England (and my house in southeastern Massachusetts), I happened upon several compelling images. Marshall Shepherd, current president of the American Meteorological Society and director of the atmospheric science program at the University of Georgia, tweeted out this annotated version of a Terra MODIS satellite image […]
Each month, Earth Observatory offers up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The ninth puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we’re looking at, when the image was acquired, and why the scene is interesting. How to answer. Your answer can be a few words […]
Many wildfires burn unnoticed in remote forests and grasslands, far from major population centers. Satellites detect the majority of them, but in many cases, images of the fire from the ground are scarce. Not so for an Australian bushfire in January 2013 that passed through the campus of Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. The world-class […]
Levels of particulate pollution rose above 130 micrograms per cubic meter in Salt Lake City on January 23, 2013. That’s three times the federal clean-air limit, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Or, as the Associated Press put it, roughly equivalent to Los Angeles air on a bad day. “The Salt Lake Valley has […]
Today we have a re-post from one of our colleagues on the sunny side of NASA. Karen C. Fox is a writer for NASA’s Heliophysics division. A new kind of television recently made headlines at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show: Ultra High Definition TV. With four times as many pixels as a current high definition […]
We thought the January puzzler would be tough, but it sure didn’t take Ron Schott long to solve it. We posted the puzzler at 12:56 a.m. Eastern (U.S.) time on January 21; a mere hour-and-thirty-four minutes later Ron posted the correct answer: the Royal Gardens subdivision in Hawaii. (Jeesh, Ron, don’t you sleep?) Ron is […]
In late 2012, floods swamped the United Kingdom and news reports said tens of thousands of residents had been affected. It was the kind of natural hazard the Earth Observatory tries to cover, but floods can be hard to see. When heavy rains are in progress, storm clouds typically hide the flooding from satellite sensors. Even […]
Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The eighth 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 why the scene is interesting. How to answer. […]
