Tuesday, September 17th, 2019
Hot and dry. These are the watchwords for large fires. While every fire needs a spark to ignite and fuel to burn, it’s the hot and dry conditions in the atmosphere that determine the likelihood of a fire starting, its intensity and the speed at which it spreads. Over the past several decades, as the
Tuesday, September 10th, 2019
The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in collaboration with the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS), used synthetic aperture radar data from the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites to produce this flood map of the Bahamas. The light-blue color indicates areas that were likely flooded when
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019
Ice fronts have retreated, rocky peaks are more exposed, fewer icebergs drift to the ocean: the branching network of glaciers that empty into Greenland’s Sermilik Fjord has changed significantly in the last half century. Comparing Landsat images from 1972 and 2019, those changes and more come into view. The glaciers appear brownish grey in this
Tuesday, August 27th, 2019
Thousands of fires have broken out in the Amazon rainforest. Satellite data show that there are almost four times as many fires this year compared to the same period last year. Apart from Brazil, parts of Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina have also been affected. While forest fires normally occur in Brazil’s dry season, which
Tuesday, August 20th, 2019
A new “State of the Climate” report released on Aug. 12, 2019, by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) confirms that 2018 was one of the hottest years on record. Global surface temperatures continued the trend in which every year since the turn of the 21st century has been hotter than any year experienced in the
Thursday, August 8th, 2019
NASA selected a space-based instrument under its Earth Venture Instrument (EVI) portfolio that will make observations of coastal waters to help protect ecosystem sustainability, improve resource management and enhance economic activity. The selected Geosynchronous Littoral Imaging and Monitoring Radiometer (GLIMR) instrument, led by principal investigator Joseph Salisbury at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, will
Tuesday, August 6th, 2019
Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the
Tuesday, July 30th, 2019
Far more accurate than any previous map, this new representation of glacier flows in Antarctica opens the door to an improved understanding of the vast continent and the future pace of sea-level rise. To create the new map, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., combined input
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2019
Louisiana is officially sinking. It has been 29 years since the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) measured the state’s subsidence. After completing four absolute gravity observations this past year, with the help of LSU’s Center for GeoInformatics (C4G), the NGS’s most-recent findings show the state’s change in elevation. “This is the second observation NGS has performed
Tuesday, July 16th, 2019
During summer 2019, 28 undergraduate students are participating in an eight-week NASA airborne science field experience that will immerse them in the agency’s Earth Science research. NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), embarking on its 11th year, offers an opportunity for undergraduates majoring in sciences, mathematics and engineering to participate in all aspects of a
