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 […]
A new video series from the National Research Council summarizes what scientists have learned about global warming and climate change. It’s difficult to pack decades of complex research into short video snippets, but the makers of these videos have done an excellent job. As you watch, keep an eye out for mentions of the key […]
Active since 2006, Batu Tara continues to puff away. A thin volcanic plume streams northwest from the cloud-shrouded volcano. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite collected this natural-color image on June 21, 2012. NASA image By Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon using EO-1 ALI data.
Congratulations to Alexandre Mathieu for being the first person to correctly identify our Satellite Puzzler from last week. We posted a full caption that explains the image in our Natural Hazards section yesterday, and it appeared at the top of our site as the Image of the Day on June 21st. The image above is a […]
On June 16, 1962, The New Yorker began publishing a serialized version of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Spring would eventually turn silent, Carson warned, because widespread pesticide use was killing so many birds that there might be none left to sing. The book provoked a strong reaction from the pesticide industry, but also led to […]
Tornadoes plague the central and eastern sections of the contiguous United States far more than the western portion. That much is obvious from this map showing 56 years of tornado tracks, from 1950 through 2006. This map breaks down tornadoes by strength based on the Fujita scale. Stronger tornadoes appear as brighter lines. (An enhanced Fujita […]
Every month or so, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The first one 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. How to answer. […]
Here at the Earth Observatory, we sift through a constant stream of data and imagery that flows in from a range of satellite, airborne, and ground-based sensors. As a result, the images we share on our website really run the gamut. Many are true-color images that look like what your naked eye would see if […]
Here at the Earth Observatory we know as well as anybody that explaining the nuance and complexity of climate modeling isn’t easy. In May, Nature Climate Change published a study pointing out that the number of news articles that mention climate change has been declining since 2007. There was a slight increase in mentions following […]
