Grant Wiseman Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada After much preparation and anticipation it is hard to believe the first week of the SMAPVEX12 campaign is already behind us. The week began with a successful training session held at the Regional Operation Centre (ROC) in Winnipeg. Field teams were instructed on how to use Hydra Probes, CropScan […]
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 […]
The transit of Venus on June 5th this year sparked much attention worldwide. Astronomers and the general public alike gathered around telescopes or grabbed their solar filter glasses to observe this rare alignment of the Sun, Venus and Earth. Members of the Natural Environments Branch brought together their telescopes to have a viewing party at …
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 […]
Eni Njoku We’ve been rained out for four straight days Friday through Monday due to unstable weather conditions in the area – not exactly what we expected! On the other hand we should certainly observe some pretty wet fields when we make our next PALS flights. On Saturday things looked good in the early morning […]
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 […]
Andreas Colliander Below are quick-look images from yesterday’s first science flights (June 7). A single polarization each of the radiometer and radar are shown. The data are from high-altitude lines 3 through 8 (lines 1 and 2 were not acquired). For reference, the study site map is also shown (at right). The radiometer brightness temperature […]
Mike Cosh June 7th was our first day of soil moisture sampling in the SMAPVEX12 experiment after two days of training and rehearsal. Beginning at 6:45am, 13 soil moisture teams set out to record surface soil moisture at 59 fields. By 2pm, the teams had returned successfully measuring moisture at 53 fields. For more […]
Eni Njoku Today was planned as the first full day of science flights and soil moisture sampling. The morning Go/No-Go telecon confirmed our “Go” decision of yesterday evening, so the ground sampling crews were given the signal to head for the fields (an hour or more drive from Winnipeg) and the PALS folk headed for […]
