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Two images of the Earth, side by side, compiled from 36,422 individual photos that were posted on social media and tagged #globalselfie on or around April 22, 2014. The Earth appears in shades of green and brown, with swirling white clouds over the top and dark blue oceans. The background is solid black.
An underwater photo of a Juvenile black, white, and yellow-striped Bluehead wrasse fish dart in and out of a dead colony of golden colored pillar coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus), now covered in various algae, in the waters of Playa Melones, Puerto Rico.
Noctilucent clouds, upper atmospheric clouds illuminated by the sun below Earth's horizon and composed of water vapor crystals that form about 50 miles in altitude during the summertime, are pictured from the International Space Station as it orbited 261 miles above the North Pacific Ocean.

What We Do

NASA’s Earth Science Division is organized around four programmatic areas: flight, research, applied sciences, and technology. Together these areas include programs and projects that are responsible for conducting and sponsoring research to advance scientific understanding of Earth as a system, collecting and disseminating new observations, developing new technologies and computational models, and building the capacity to develop innovative applications of Earth science observations and research results. 

Learn More about What We Do

Featured Programs & Projects

New Black Logo, with white letters NEX and a globe lit up with light blue and white colors, of NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) Program

NASA Earth Exchange

NEX combines state-of-the-art supercomputing, Earth system modeling, and NASA remote sensing data feeds to deliver a work environment for exploring and analyzing terabyte- to petabyte-scale datasets covering large regions, continents or the globe.

Earth Science Projects Office

The Ames Earth Science Project Office is a small group of success-oriented individuals providing project management for NASA's Science Mission Directorate field research.

Official logo for the Airborne Sensor Facility at NASA Ames.

Airborne Sensor Facility

The Airborne Sensor Facility (ASF) at NASA Ames supports a variety of airborne research activities for the NASA Earth Science Division.

Official logo for the Airborne Science Program at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC).

Airborne Science Program

The Airborne Science Program within the Earth Science Division is responsible for providing aircraft systems that further science and advance the use of satellite data.

Official logo for the NASA FireSense program.

FireSense

FireSense is a NASA-wide effort to bring together data, technology, research, flights, aeronautics, innovation, applications to create the next generation of tools and science-informed capabilities for wildfire adapted communities and to enable society to live sustainably with wildland fires.

ARSET

ARSET offers online and in-person trainings for beginners and advanced practitioners alike. Trainings cover a range of datasets, web portals, and analysis tools and their application to air quality, agriculture, disaster, land, and water resources management.

OpenET

OpenET uses best available science to provide easily accessible satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) data for improved water management across the western United States.

A logo shaped lie a shield, with the outline of California in yellow across the front. There are also gray mountains, green trees, and brown logs, all done in a cartoon style, and the whole design is bordered in orange. Across the front is the word WERK in white text with a teal border.

WERK

WERK, the Wildfire, Ecosystem Resilience, and Risk Assessment Initiative is a partnership between the state of California and NASA Ames to co-develop actionable, updatable, freely-accessible data products to monitor and to protect California ecosystems, now and for generations to come.

NASA logo

CAR

Cloud Absorption Radiometer

A map of the United States shows a gradient that goes from dark red, through burnt orange, then gold, then white. The darkest concentration is in the northeast, centered around Michigan.

RASI

The Risk Assessment Science Innovators Workgroup (RASI)’s mission is to provide the latest scientific research on climate change to help NASA facilities managers adapt to increasing climate risks in timely and effective ways. 

A man kneels down to work on a multi-rotor drone sitting on the pavement.

Disaster Response Coordination System (DRCS)

Ames is a participating center in NASA’s Disaster Response Coordination System (DRCS). The Earth Sciences Division maintains dedicated coordinators to actively monitor for disaster threats, network with emergency management agencies, and connect Ames’ Earth Observation experts with emergency responders during disaster response situations.

Screenshot showing a simulated flights over the continental US using the NAS Digital Twin. The image shows thousands of traditional aircraft and dozens of hybrid electric aircraft in certain areas of the US, mostly in the northeast.

Earth Science Digital Twins

Researchers are working with NASA’s Land Cover Land Use Change (LCLUC) Science Team to develop NASA Land Earth Science Digital Twins (L-ESDT). The goal of this Digital Twins model is to better understand the impact of LCLUC on weather and climate.

Missions

Official logo for Asia AQ.

Asia-AQ

Airborne and Satellite Investigation of Asian Air Quality (Asia-AQ) is conducting airborne sampling across four locations in collaboration with local partners, to improve understanding of the factors controlling local air quality across Asia through multi-perspective observations and modeling.

The official logo for ABOVE: arctic-boreal vulnerability experiement.

ABoVE

ABoVE is a field campaign being conducted in Alaska and Western Canada, broadly focused on gaining a better understanding of the vulnerability and resilience of Arctic and boreal ecosystems to environmental change in western North America, as well as providing the scientific basis for informed decision-making to guide societal responses at local to international levels.

A map of North America shows several wide swaths of purple illustrating smoke in the atmosphere as measured by NASA's TEMPO instrument during wildfires in Manitoba from June 2, 2025.

TEMPO

Researchers within the biospheric science branch are leading the application and validation of NASA’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) satellite ozone profile products.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2)

OCO-2 & OCO-3

Biospheric science branch researcher Matthew Johnson plays a key role in the OCO-2/3 Flux Science Team by providing global/regional flux results from the assimilation of this NASA data into the Ames CO2 model.

Data visualization of nitrogen dioxide concentrations over the southwest US. Most of the map is light blue fading to yellow, representing lower concentrations, with a mass of darker red to purple over LA, representing higher concentrations. The mass is smaller and lighter than in the previous image.

Aura

Biospheric science branch researchers are Science Team members of NASA’s Aura satellite mission. They conduct critical application and validation studies for retrieved products from this spaceborne sensor.

A map of Earth's surface highlighting sea surface salinity across the world's oceans. The land masses appear green, brown, and white. The oceans range in color from deep turquoise to almost white, with lighter areas representing higher salinity and darker areas representing lower. The light, high-salinity areas are mostly near the equator, with a wide band of low-salinity water near Antarctica.

SMAP

Biospheric science researchers assimilate SMAP observations of daily soil freeze-thaw (FT) state into the CASA (Carnegie-Ames-Stanford) ecosystem model to reduce the uncertainty of global and regional carbon flux estimates and wildfire emissions.

This animation shows global sea level data collected by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite from July 26 to Aug. 16. Red and orange indicate higher-than-average ocean heights, while blue represents lower-than-average heights.

SWOT

As PI of the TROPIC-SWOT project and member of the SWOT Science Team, biospheric researchers quantify ocean surface currents and understand their physics using the new high-resolution sea level observations from SWOT in the tropical and equatorial oceans. It is anticipated that this fundamental research will lead to improved fine scale predictions of ocean drift in the tropics, e.g. of debris, spilled oil, or distressed boats, as well as improved seasonal and longer term predictions of weather, climate, and the water cycle (e.g., floods, droughts, etc.) via better modeling of El Niño/Southern Oscillation dynamics that depend sensitively on upper ocean physics in the equatorial Pacific.

Internships

OCEANOS Logo

OCEANOS

OCEANOS is a bilingual, oceanography summer internship based out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, with a mission to bring oceanography and STEM opportunities to the Hispanic/Latino community.

Official logo for the DEVELOP program.

DEVELOP

DEVELOP, part of NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, addresses environmental and public policy issues through interdisciplinary research projects that apply the lens of NASA Earth observations to community concerns around the globe. 

FireSage controlled burn.

FireSage

FireSage is a summer internship opportunity designed to equip students with expertise in fire ecology and remote sensing technologies. This 10-week internship program offers a paid opportunity to work on-site at NASA Ames Earth Science Division and SJSU’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center (WIRC) Geofly Lab and FireEcology Lab.

NASA Insignia

Past Programs, Projects, and Missions