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 …
Is that a three omicron? Nope. Three, rho? Strike two. Our latest Earth Indicator is three-sigma. In Greek, sigma (σ) is the 18th letter of the alphabet. In statistics, it’s a symbol for standard deviation, a measure of how spread out a set of data points are from the average (which is often called the […]
Earlier this week, as India endured the worst blackout in its history, many readers and members of the media asked us to show the vast country without lights. Just a few weeks ago, Earth Observatory showed the world what the Mid-Atlantic United States looked like before and after a massive storm-induced blackout. (We also showed […]
Kochechum River 64°42’31’’M 100° 54’ 14’’ E 10:19 p.m. Siberia 10:19 a.m. EDT 79°F High 48°F Low Sunny Dr. Ranson reports: We have finally just landed on a camping spot, after a long day on the Kochechum. We spent about hours on the river today. Last night’s camp was about 100 miles upriver – a […]
Embenchime River 65°16’35’’N 101°9’21’’E 11:00 p.m. Siberia 11:00 a.m. EDT 78° F High 49°F Low Sunny Dr. Ranson reports: We hopped out of our tents early this morning, broke camp, grabbed a quick breakfast and headed into the forest to make our measurements. We were in the woods by 8:30 this morning, and didn’t return […]
Besides acquiring photo-like images of the surface of Earth, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites can detect the anomalously high temperatures associated with actively burning fires. Using this “hotspot” data, John Nelson of IDV Solutions made a map of major fires in the contiguous 48 United States from 2001 […]
Embenchime River 66.34 N 100.63 E 11:30 p.m. Siberia, 11:30 a.m. EDT 78°F High 52°F Low Partially cloudy Dr. Ranson reports: I am tired tonight. Actually, I think everyone is tired, because it was a very long and intense day. The day started early. Really early. As in, today’s work started late last night. As […]
