Hyperwall Show: Earth Observing Fleet with Suomi NPP and Aquarius
- Visualizations by:
- Ernie Wright
- View full credits
This animation shows the orbits of NASA's current (as of November 2011) fleet of Earth remote sensing observatories. The satellites include components of the A-Train (Terra, Aqua, Aura, CloudSat, CALIPSO), two satellites launched in 2011 (Aquarius, Suomi NPP), and nine others (ACRIMSAT, SORCE, GRACE, Jason 1 and 2, Landsat 7, QuikSCAT, TRMM, and EO-1). These satellites measure tropical rainfall, solar irradiance, clouds, sea surface height, ocean salinity, and other aspects of the global environment. Together, they provide a picture of the Earth as a system.
This is an update of entry 3725. It was created for display on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall, a 5 x 3 array of high-definition displays with a total pixel resolution of 6840 x 2304. The orbits are based on orbital elements with epochs in November of 2011. The animation spans six hours, from 15:00 to 21:00 UT (10 am to 4 pm EST) on November 30, 2011.

Hyperwall frames. The names of the screens that comprise the hyperwall follow the spreadsheet convention in which rows are assigned numbers, beginning with 1 at the top, and columns are assigned letters, beginning with A at the left. The display in the upper left is A1. The display in the bottom right is E3 (for a 5 x 3 display).
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
Animators
- Ernie Wright (USRA) [Lead]
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
- Tom Bridgman (GST)
Datasets used in this visualization
Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)
Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).
Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/
See more visualizations using this data setGEOS-5 Cubed-Sphere (A.K.A. GEOS-5 Atmospheric Model on the Cubed-Sphere)
The model is the GEOS-5 atmospheric model on the cubed-sphere, run at 14-km global resolution for 30-days. GEOS-5 is described here http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/ and the cubed-sphere work is described here http://sivo.gsfc.nasa.gov/cubedsphere_overview.html.
See more visualizations using this data setNote: 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.