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 […]
By Eric Lindstrom The SPURS experiment involves not only sea-going oceanographers but modelers, and of course, remote sensing scientists using satellite data. As part of the daily posts from R/V Knorr I will go into more detail on the role of the models and satellite data in the overall scientific enterprise. I will profile the […]
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 […]
By Eric Lindstrom As I mentioned in my previous post, our cruise will depart from Woods Hole, MA on September 6. Roughly, it will take eight days for our ship, R/V Knorr, to transit from Woods Hole to the SPURS central mooring site at 25N, 38W, the saltiest spot in the subtropical North Atlantic. Then […]
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 […]
By Eric Lindstrom On September 6, a bunch of NASA-funded scientists, and me among them, will depart on an expedition across the North Atlantic Ocean to study salt concentration levels of seawater. But why do we want to spend six weeks at sea measuring ocean saltiness? Hopefully, over the coming months you will come to […]
Greenbelt, MD 84°F High 74° F low Sunny The transition from a remote-area scientific expedition to everyday life comes fast and hard. Even though the flight from Tura to Baltimore consumes over 24 hours, those are the last slow moments that the scientist will experience. The moment the aircraft touches down, the race begins. It […]
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 […]
The All Sky camera network captured over 183 multi-station Perseid meteors Saturday night. Some truly spectacular events — see images below. The Perseids have been observed for at least 2,000 years and are associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud …
