Blogs

Levels of particulate pollution rose above 130 micrograms per cubic meter in Salt Lake City on January 23, 2013.  That’s three times the federal clean-air limit, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  Or, as the Associated Press put it, roughly equivalent to Los Angeles air on a bad day. “The Salt Lake Valley has […]

Today we have a re-post from one of our colleagues on the sunny side of NASA. Karen C. Fox is a writer for NASA’s Heliophysics division. A new kind of television recently made headlines at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show: Ultra High Definition TV. With four times as many pixels as a current high definition […]

We thought the January puzzler would be tough, but it sure didn’t take Ron Schott long to solve it.  We posted the puzzler at 12:56 a.m. Eastern (U.S.) time on January 21; a mere hour-and-thirty-four minutes later Ron posted the correct answer: the Royal Gardens subdivision in Hawaii. (Jeesh, Ron, don’t you sleep?)  Ron is […]

In late 2012, floods swamped the United Kingdom and news reports said tens of thousands of residents had been affected. It was the kind of natural hazard the Earth Observatory tries to cover, but floods can be hard to see. When heavy rains are in progress, storm clouds typically hide the flooding from satellite sensors. Even […]

Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The eighth 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 why the scene is interesting. How to answer. […]

The weather seems to be getting weirder by the month. Perhaps we are more attuned to it now, in our hyper-connected, 24-hour-news-cycle world where the news from faraway places is almost as accessible as the news form our hometown. But the research and the models say that weather extremes should grow more extreme, and the observations […]

On March 11, 2009, we posted our first image on Facebook, a spectacular view of ash billowing from Mount Etna (below). At the time, we had just a handful of friends on Facebook, and just a few of them shared it with theirs. Fast forward three years…and tens of thousands of you have joined our […]

Whether it was retreating ice, super storms, wildfires, or the simple changing of the seasons there was no shortage of fascinating, beautiful, and occasionally ominous imagery in 2012. Throughout the year, we published more than 600 images. Of those, the ten most popular (based on the number of page views) are below. Click on each image […]

Congratulations to Alan for being our first reader to work out that the December puzzler showed an area near the Flat Tops in northwestern Colorado. Alan recognized that the treeless regions in the lower right were plateaus and pinpointed the location on December 19, even pointing out Devils Causeway. Meanwhile, other puzzler players — notably […]

Every month, NASA Earth Observatory will offer up a puzzling satellite image here on Earth Matters. The seventh 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 why the scene is interesting. How to answer. […]