Mapping the Amazon: Mosaic tiles animation

  • Released Thursday, March 14, 2002
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A satellite can cover the Amazon in just two months. The mapping team chose a Japanese satellite outfitted with synthetic aperture radar, or SAR for short. SAR is a natural fit for the Amazon. It can penetrate the clouds that pour rain for half of the year and the smoke from trees burned by farmers to clear land. SAR even works at night. As you might imagine, the satellite collects a pile of data. In raw form, these observations are gibberish. Focusing them requires a supercomputer to crunch fifteen hundred trillion calculations. The output is rich images of the Amazon. Scientists listed worked as a team on Mosaicking Software and Mosaic Production.

1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic

1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic

1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic

1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic

1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic

Video slate image reads, "Mosaic tiles animation1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic".

Video slate image reads, "Mosaic tiles animation
1,500 scenes combine into Amazon rainforest mosaic".

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Data Processing was done by Alaska SAR Facility, Advanced Computing Technology Applications for SAR Interferometry and Imaging Science http://pat.jpl.nasa.gov/public/SAR/, Global Rainforest Mapping Project CD-ROM Requests http://www.eorc.nasda.go.jp/Sciences/Forest/order.html

This page was originally published on Thursday, March 14, 2002.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:57 PM EDT.

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