Ship Tracks Reveal Pollution's Effects on Clouds
- Visualizations by:
- Helen-Nicole Kostis
- View full credits
This set provides content of the narrated scientific visualization: movies, frames, audio and transcript.
For complete transcript, click here.
This video is also available on our YouTube channel.
This narrated visualization illustrates how we can study the effect against a clean backdrop by looking for zones of pollution in otherwise pristine air - in this case the North Pacific Ocean near the Aleutian islands. On an overcast day, the clouds look uniform. However, MODIS' sesor reveals a different picture - long skinny trails of brighter clouds hidden within. As ships travel across the ocean, pollution in the ships' exhaust create more cloud drops that are smaller in size, resulting in even brighter clouds. On clear days, ships can actually create new clouds. Water vapor condenses around the particles of pollution, forming streamers of clouds as the ships travel on. The ship tracks themselves are too small to impact global temperatures, but they help us understand how larger pollution sources such as industrial sites or agricultural burning might be changing clouds on a larger scale.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Animators
- Helen-Nicole Kostis (USRA) [Lead]
- Ernie Wright (USRA)
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
- Horace Mitchell (NASA/GSFC)
Scientists
- Galina Wind (SSAI)
- Michael King (NASA/GSFC)
Producer
- Jennifer A. Shoemaker (UMBC)
Narrator
- Jefferson Beck (KBRwyle)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
Terra and Aqua True Color (A.K.A. Band Combination 1, 4, 3) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related pages
Crisscrossing Clouds
Oct. 24, 2011, 8 p.m.
Read moreShip fumes create streaky white clouds visible from space. A NASA data visualizer stitched together 298 cloud scenes collected by the Terra and Aqua satellites to create this video. An unusually large number of ship tracks are visible in the clouds off the coast of France and Spain in this true-color satellite image. It t apparent in visible light by looking at the infrared. A NASA research aircraft captured this photograph of a container ship (right) and its ship track (center) off the coast of California. A schematic illustration shows how ship fumes increase the number of small particles in the atmosphere causing abnormally bright clouds.