Blogs

The Elegant Figures blog will be a place for me (Robert Simmon, the Earth Observatory’s lead visualizer) to write about some of the data visualization and information design we do on the Earth Observatory.

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In the very beginning of this blog, I had promised to reveal why noise created by electric guitars pedals&amps reminded me of the kind of science we faced during CARES. So, after the closing of the campaign, I want to keep that promise. A microphone in front of an amplifier can generate an endless reverb, […]

It is 6:30 AM and you are waiting for the morning weather briefing to start, in which the meteorological conditions for the next few days are laid out and the science teams go over their flight plans for the day.  You were up late last night putting the final touches on the flight plan for […]

Just a brief heads-up, to signal a couple of particularly interesting links. You can check the status of the mission at any time by pointing your browser at this public Wiki page, and make sure we deliver our promises of “flying around” all over California by following the B-200 trajectories on Flight Aware. Just enter NASA529 […]

Why is our satellite mission named “Glory”? I can give you an explanation based on this short movie, which I captured from a downward looking camera on the B-200 during a recent flight. While descending for landing, we encountered a cloud deck, and I received a clue for what, in geek terms, we call a scattering angle of […]

As previously stated, it is Cool like in Cool, CA. Our first science meeting took place midway between T0 (McClellan Air Force Base) and T1 (Cool), so I couldn’t get a better chance to drive to the site that marks our downwind sampling location (T1, that is). Off Rt. 80, you’ve got to follow the […]

On June 15, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy (photo above) will depart Dutch Harbor, Alaska, for its 5-week-long journey north through the Bering Strait to the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Along the way, forty-three NASA-funded scientists will study how climate change is affecting the ecology of the Arctic. They will collect samples and even […]

There’re two instruments on the Beech King Air B200.  One is the HSRL, which stands for High Spectral Resolution LIDAR. The latter word is an acronym born out of the marriage between RADAR and LASER. Even Radiohead use it. The one mounted on the B200 is an advanced device that my colleagues at NASA Langley […]

Today is a hard down day, long due after intense work around the aircraft and the two flights of yesterday. Things are definitely getting dirtier, and we started observing a decent amount of aerosols all along our flight trajectories. I stitched this panorama of the McClellan airfield in between the two flights (2: 15 pm […]