{ "count": 432, "next": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/search/?limit=100&offset=100&search=%22For+Educators%22", "previous": null, "results": [ { "id": 5474, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5474/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2025-01-20T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "Science On a Sphere: 4 Years of Biosphere", "description": "Biosphere data processed for display on Science On a Sphere (SOS)", "hits": 71 }, { "id": 14530, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14530/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2024-02-21T08:00:00-05:00", "title": "Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) Solar Patrol", "description": "The Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope (GAVRT) is located in Goldstone, California. It is a reconfigured antenna used for teaching purposes.The GAVRT program teaches K-12 students how to calibrate this 34-meter antenna (known as Deep Space Station-28), collect and distribute science data through the Internet and get excited about radio astronomy. Students collaborate with scientists who are working on the same mission and are recognized as part of the science team. Data collected and analyzed by the students is used by NASA in their studies of the solar system.During the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, educators at the Lewis Center for Education Research in Southern California, and participants in the center’s Solar Patrol citizen science program will observe solar “active regions” – the magnetically complex regions that form over sunspots – as the Moon moves over them. The Moon’s gradual passage across the Sun blocks different portions of the active region at different times, allowing scientists to distinguish light signals coming from one portion versus another. The technique, first used during the May 2012 annular eclipse, revealed details on the Sun the telescope couldn’t otherwise detect. || ", "hits": 71 }, { "id": 5075, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5075/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2023-02-13T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "Near Real-Time Global Biosphere", "description": "The latest 2.5 years of Biosphere data with date annotations. || nrtbio_print.jpg (1024x512) [205.4 KB] || nrtbio_searchweb.png (320x160) [88.7 KB] || nrtbio_thm.png (80x40) [7.2 KB] || Plate_Carree_with_Dates (4096x2048) [0 Item(s)] || nrtbio_annot_plate_2048p30.mp4 (4096x2048) [113.2 MB] || slide-01.hwshow ||", "hits": 0 }, { "id": 5006, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5006/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2022-11-06T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Global Biosphere March 2017 - Feb 2022", "description": "Example composite of 5 years of Mollweide projected data of Earth's biosphere beginning March 2017 through February 2022. || newbio_v34_mollweide_comp1130_print.jpg (1024x512) [186.1 KB] || newbio_v34_mollweide_comp1130_searchweb.png (180x320) [94.2 KB] || newbio_v34_mollweide_comp1130_thm.png (80x40) [7.4 KB] || Example_Composite (2000x1000) [0 Item(s)] || newbio_v34_mollweide_comp_1000p30.mp4 (2000x1000) [40.4 MB] || newbio_v34_mollweide_comp_1000p30.webm (2000x1000) [4.5 MB] || ", "hits": 59 }, { "id": 40447, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/visualizationsfor-educators/", "result_type": "Gallery", "release_date": "2022-08-17T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Visualizations for Educators", "description": "Phenomena are observable events that occur in nature. Data visualizations can offer new ways for students to experience and explore Earth and space phenomena that happen over large scales of time and at great distances. This gallery includes visualizations of phenomena that support topics that are taught in middle and high school and are aligned with select Next Generation Science Standards.\n\n\nThis gallery was curated by Anne Arundle County Science Teachers Margaret Graham and Jeremy Milligan with support from Dr. Rachel Connolly during the summer of 2022. A video showing how Jeremy Milligan uses SVS resources to develop a phenomena-based lesson is also available.", "hits": 331 }, { "id": 13878, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13878/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2021-07-09T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Quickshot: Skywatchers Delight! July 12-13 Venus and Mars Will Appear Extra Close To Each Other In Night Sky", "description": "Quick link to associated B-ROLLQuick link to soundbites with Giada Arney / DAVINCI Deputy Principal InvestigatorQuick link to soundbites with Jim Garvin / DAVINCI Principal Investigator || venus.banner3-final.jpg (926x179) [50.5 KB] || venus.banner3-final_print.jpg (1024x197) [50.0 KB] || venus.banner3-final_searchweb.png (320x180) [112.6 KB] || venus.banner3-final_thm.png (80x40) [9.1 KB] || ", "hits": 53 }, { "id": 4823, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4823/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2020-09-11T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Draining the Oceans", "description": "Data visualization of the draining of the Earth's oceans. The visualization simulates an incremental drop of 10 meters of the water’s level on Earth’s surface. As time progresses and the oceans drain, it becomes evident that underwater mountain ranges are bigger in size and trenches are deeper in comparison to those on dry land. While water drains quickly closer to continents, it drains slowly in our planet’s deepest trenches. || OceanDrain_3840x2160_60fps_0837_print.jpg (1024x576) [259.5 KB] || OceanDrain_3840x2160_60fps_0837_print_searchweb.png (320x180) [97.8 KB] || OceanDrain_3840x2160_60fps_0837_print_thm.png (80x40) [7.8 KB] || OceanDrain_1920x1080_30fps.mp4 (1920x1080) [44.2 MB] || OceanDrain_1920x1080_30fps.webm (1920x1080) [4.3 MB] || OceanDrain (3840x2160) [0 Item(s)] || OceanDrain (3840x2160) [0 Item(s)] || OceanDrain_3840x2160_60fps_0837.tif (3840x2160) [31.6 MB] || OceanDrain_3840x2160_30fps.mp4 (3840x2160) [154.1 MB] || OceanDrain_1920x1080_30fps.mp4.hwshow [192 bytes] || ", "hits": 789 }, { "id": 4813, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4813/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2020-04-21T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Day 2020: Biosphere", "description": "Global Biosphere data from 1997 through 2017 with corresponding colorbars and date stamp.This video is also available on our YouTube channel. || earthday_bio_comp.0000_print.jpg (1024x576) [95.0 KB] || earthday_bio_comp.0000_searchweb.png (320x180) [51.5 KB] || earthday_bio_comp.0000_thm.png (80x40) [5.0 KB] || earthday_biosphere_composite (1920x1080) [0 Item(s)] || earthday_bio_comp_1080p30.webm (1920x1080) [17.9 MB] || earthday_bio_comp_1080p30.mp4 (1920x1080) [106.0 MB] || captions_silent.29351.en_US.srt [43 bytes] || earthday_bio_comp_1080p30.mp4.hwshow [191 bytes] || ", "hits": 77 }, { "id": 12889, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12889/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2018-03-08T11:45:00-05:00", "title": "Mission Possible: Women of the Hubble Space Telescope", "description": "When they were growing up, six women couldn’t have imagined that their lives would take them on a journey to NASA to work with the Hubble Space Telescope. From astronaut to social media lead, from scientists to engineers, these featured \"Women of Hubble\" overcame obstacles and persevered to achieve success and help make Hubble one of the greatest exploration machines in human history. Their inspirational stories teach us that anyone can succeed if you stay curious, never give up, and don’t let anything keep you from reaching your goals. || ", "hits": 44 }, { "id": 4597, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4597/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2017-11-16T15:00:00-05:00", "title": "Earth: Our Living Planet (Updated)", "description": "Twenty years of global biosphere data mapped on a slowly spinning globe. || slow_spin_4k.5542_print.jpg (1024x576) [83.1 KB] || slow_spin_4k.5542_searchweb.png (320x180) [48.3 KB] || slow_spin_4k.5542_thm.png (80x40) [4.4 KB] || 1920x1080_16x9_30p (1920x1080) [0 Item(s)] || slow_spin_1080p30.webm (1920x1080) [17.8 MB] || slow_spin_1080p30.mp4 (1920x1080) [119.2 MB] || 3840x2160_16x9_30p (3840x2160) [0 Item(s)] || slow_spin_4k.mp4 (3840x2160) [397.0 MB] || ", "hits": 75 }, { "id": 4596, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4596/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2017-11-14T17:00:00-05:00", "title": "20 Years of Global Biosphere (updated)", "description": "This Mollweide projected data visualization shows 20 years of Earth's biosphere starting in September 1997 going through September 2017. Data for this visualization was collected from multiple satellites over the past twenty years. || biosphere7_mollweide.4507_print.jpg (576x1024) [192.2 KB] || biosphere7_mollweide.4507_searchweb.png (180x320) [91.0 KB] || biosphere7_mollweide.4507_thm.png (80x40) [7.4 KB] || mollweide_annotated (1920x1080) [0 Item(s)] || biosphere7_mollweide_1080p30.webm (1920x1080) [17.8 MB] || biosphere7_mollweide_1080p30.mp4 (1920x1080) [264.8 MB] || biosphere7_mollweide_1080p30.mp4.hwshow || ", "hits": 118 }, { "id": 4395, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4395/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-23T12:00:00-04:00", "title": "Q&A with NASA Visualizer, Lori Perkins", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.How did you discover your passion for Earth Science?I have loved Earth Science since I was a little girl. I was the only little girl in my class that loved changing cloud patterns, thunderstorms, and lightning.What do you enjoy most about what you do?I love that my job gives me the opportunity to explain all sorts of interesting science results and phenomenon.What inspired you to work in this field?The Star Wars movies and NASA's Apollo Program!Where do you work and do you remember what it was like on your first day of work?Now, I work at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. I started at NASA working as a student writing fortran code in a data processing facility that aimed to provide error-free telemetry transmissions from spacecraft to the ground. On my first day, I remember all of my coworkers speaking in acronyms. I didn’t know what the acronyms meant.What are some of the most important lessons you have learned in your life?Don't be afraid to ask questions and don't be afraid to throw out an idea that might seem crazy.What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?I worked on a piece that won the National Science Foundation's Visualization of the Year. It is a wonderful piece that explains the important connection between the Sun and our Earth. || ", "hits": 16 }, { "id": 4394, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4394/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-21T15:00:00-04:00", "title": "Q&A with RaD-X Project Scientist, Erica Alston", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.You are the Project Scientist and Education and Public Outreach (EPO) lead for the Rad-X Project. What is Rad-X, why is it important, and what is the EPO and project scientist's role?NASA's Radiation Dosimetry Experiment, or RaD-X, is a low-cost, high-altitude balloon project. Its mission is to help us understand and quantify cosmic ray exposure at the top of atmosphere. That's the zone where commercial airlines fly. This is important because these cosmic rays are a primary source of ionizing radiation in the atmosphere and increase the risk of cancer and other health impacts. A pilot absorbs as much radiation as a worker in a nuclear power plant, yet the dose of radiation they receive during a cosmic storm or during the span of their career is not quantified or documented.The RaD-X payload consists of four radiation sensors that are used to measure incoming radiation. The RaD-X payload was launched on September 25, 2015 via a high-altitude research balloon. This supplements NASA's Nowcast of Atmospheric Ionizing Radiation for Aviation Safety (NAIRAS) model, which helps us make informed decisions about radiation exposure safety for flight crews, the general public, and commercial space operations. RaD-X also supported Cubes in Space on their inaugural balloon flight, which carried various science projects from schools across the U.S. Cubes in Space is a global design contest in which teams of secondary school students from around the world develop unique science experiments for launch into the upper atmosphere. During the 24-hour mission, the RaD-X payload and Cubes in Space experienced altitudes above 100,000 ft. during the day and above 60,000 ft. during the night. On RaD-X, I had dual roles. First as the Project Scientist it was my job to serve as an interface between the scientists and engineers. Essentially, to help them speak the same language and communicate effectively. I was also the EPO lead. This included coordinating school visits, developing fact sheets, and interfacing with NASA Langley Research Center’s public affairs and communications.How do you use Earth visualizations? Does it have applications to the Rad-X project?Using data from the NAIRAS model, we create visualizations of predicted radiation exposure at multiple altitudes. These show exposure rates at aircraft levels and a vertical profile on global exposure rates. Now that we have successfully launched the Rad-X mission, we have started to analyze real data. During the launch we monitored (in real-time) how the measurements compared with the model predicted values from NAIRAS. Creating visualizations in real-time made the comparisons easier to interpret. || ", "hits": 11 }, { "id": 4366, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4366/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-16T16:00:00-04:00", "title": "The Chesapeake Bay in 661 Million Pixels", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.Imagine you're flying 438 miles above the Earth taking pictures and collecting information of everything below. What do you see? Now imagine you’ve been doing this non-stop for over 40 years. Do you notice any change? A satellite series named Landsat has been doing exactly that. As a NASA scientist, I've been using Landsat-8 (the current satellite) data for a long time. Yet it's still amazing to create images of salt reflecting a brilliant white in a natural color scene, or seeing it turn a beautiful cyan using an infrared perspective. With the right tools I can discern patterns in the salt or make visible the phytoplankton dancing on the blue ocean. I've observed cities grow, forests recover from fire, islands form, and more. Our world is constantly changing.When sunlight hits the Earth's surface, it is absorbed, reflected, or scattered, resulting in different wavelengths of light leaving the Earth. Landsat-8 measures the visible and infrared wavelengths in 30-meter pixels and in order to \"see\" the image, we assign particular colors to different wavelengths. || ", "hits": 30 }, { "id": 4387, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4387/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-13T17:00:00-04:00", "title": "El Niño: Disrupting the Marine Food Web", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.In case you haven’t heard, El Niño is starting to make headlines this year. Often nicknamed \"the bad boy of weather,\" who is this guy?A long time ago, fishermen off the west coast of South America — one of the world's most productive fisheries — noticed that some years the fish disappeared. This was especially noticeable around Christmas time — giving it the name El Niño, which means Christ child in Spanish. Today we know why El Niño happens — but knowing when it will happen is still a challenge. Normally, winds blow from east to west along the equator, pushing surface water westward. As the water moves away from the east, nutrient-rich deeper ocean water rises to fill the void (called upwelling.) When nutrients rise into sunlight, they cause blooms of tiny plants called phytoplankton. These plants feed the entire marine food web from small fish such as sardines to bigger fish, sea birds, and marine mammals. When an El Niño develops, the normal east-to-west winds die and warm surface water from the west Pacific moves eastward. This stops the upwelling in the east. Without the supply of deeper, nutrient-rich water, less phytoplankton bloom and the fisheries collapse. From satellites in space we see how these changes impact the ocean’s color. Normally, the ocean looks more green along the equator (image below, left.) During El Niño, the ocean looks more blue and less green because there is less plant life (images below, right.) While this color change is subtle to our eyes, it means life or death for the species that depend upon plankton for food. Some animals starve (e.g. sea lions, marine iguanas, Galapagos penguins) while others move away to look for food elsewhere. || ", "hits": 35 }, { "id": 4385, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4385/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-09T17:00:00-04:00", "title": "Zooming In: Remote Sensing the Earth", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.Observing something without coming in contact with it is called remote sensing. Think about that. Every living animal uses remote sensing. A spider keeps its eight eyes fixed on a fly, watches its movements. A dolphin sends out sounds to locate a school of fish. A tiger uses its Jacobson's organ to smell a mate. Humans listen to cicadas' loud noises coming from the trees. These are all examples of remote sensing. And, more than likely, all of these animals are analyzing the data they are receiving. I used these particular examples to show that there are different methods of receiving this data. The spider uses sight. The dolphin uses echolocation. The tiger uses smell. The human uses sound. I remember the first time I flew in an airplane. I was about 12 years old and was lucky enough to get a window seat. It was amazing to look down and try to identify things on the ground. I didn't realize it at the time but I was remotely sensing Earth! I could almost imagine how a bird must see the land when it's flying high in the sky. Since I cannot fly all the time like birds do, I can use another tool — Google Earth — to get the same experience. I can look at my computer screen, and identify the differences between urban and natural areas and between fields and forests. NASA creates the most amazing remotely-sensed images of space and the planets. I have always been fascinated by space and space exploration. In 1969, as I listened on my radio to the broadcast of the moon landing, I wondered what it would be like to walk on the moon and to look further out into space. Now, space telescopes, such as Hubble, provide scientists with hundreds of thousands of images for understanding our universe. Images of outer space are fascinating, but I am most excited about images of Earth. NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have created an amazing collection of satellite images, called Earth as Art. Sometimes these almost look like art from a museum. These images are not only pleasing to look at; they can also tell us valuable information. || ", "hits": 58 }, { "id": 4386, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4386/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-09T17:00:00-04:00", "title": "Beyond Graphs: You, Too, Can Be A Data Visualizer!", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.As an education specialist for NASA, I help teachers and students access and make sense of data. This often means using a type of visual representation. This could be anything from a simple bar graph to a complex animated visualization. Take a look at the last seven days of global precipitation, or other great examples relating to Visualizing Earth Systems here. While the complex animations may be difficult to replicate, a line or bar graph is just the beginning.I work for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, so let's use snow data for an example. This data is from a big snowstorm that hit upstate New York in November 2014. While the GPM satellite does measure snowfall, we'll start with data collected by \"citizen scientists.\" Citizen science is research conducted by non-professional scientists — which could include you! These particular citizen scientists are part of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS.)The data below is from one station, graphed using Microsoft Excel. It shows snow accumulation in inches at the location of one monitoring station over four days. (Note: CoCoRaHS reports are made in the morning reflecting the previous 24 hours of precipitation. The dates below show snow that fell the day and night prior.) || ", "hits": 27 }, { "id": 4379, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4379/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-09T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Making Video Games for NASA", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.How would you like to fly alongside a NASA satellite and see the Earth as the satellite's instruments see it? You can, with a free app called NASA's Eyes on the Earth. It includes NASA's entire fleet of Earth-observing satellites. Ride along virtually with any of them in real time or at super-speed. || ", "hits": 30 }, { "id": 4378, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4378/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-02T17:00:00-04:00", "title": "Visualizations: A NASA Eye View of Our Earth", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.Nearly every time I give a talk at the Hyperwall — a genius NASA creation which combines 9 to 15 high definition screens together to show amazing visualizations, pictures, movies and more — I always like to start with the GEOS-5 model of aerosols. This visualization shows how different types of aerosols (black and organic carbon, sea salt, dust, and sulfates) move around our planet. From this mesmerizing movie, you can see where dust storms originate from the Sahara, where fires in the Amazon are spewing black carbon into the atmosphere and how sea salt is spiraling around the southern oceans in huge bands.The funny thing is that this visualization has very little to do with my own research... I just think it is really cool and most people agree with me! By getting them engaged through this visualization, they quickly see how our Earth system is interconnected and how a dust storm over China could actually impact them in their own backyards in the U.S.As a scientist, I always get excited when someone asks me about my work with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. Usually when I start describing how the GPM Core satellite measures rainfall and why it's important, I do a lot of hand waving. Sometimes I try to describe what we can do with satellites with a metaphor or two. Those are all helpful in painting a picture. But what really seems to make the point is when I pull up a particular visualization of a dozen or so different satellites all taking precipitation measurements over the globe within the same 3-hour window. With a short movie you can see how we can get a global picture of rain and snow everywhere around the world within a few hours! || ", "hits": 33 }, { "id": 4377, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4377/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-02T16:00:00-04:00", "title": "A 3-D Look at Weather, Clouds, and Aerosols", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: The Earth Science Week 2015 page.I've always been fascinated by our atmosphere. Think about it: even though we don't see it, above us is a great aerial ocean! Over time my fascination has grown from weather maps and pondering the origins of storms, to learning all about the physics that surround our everyday lives. From as early as grade school I was also very interested in computers: diagnosing errors, developing programming skills and learning all about hardware and operating systems. So you might say my interests naturally led me to a career as a NASA scientist, where I create visualizations to study the underlying factors that drive weather patterns. Visualizations help us to see the world differently and actively.Many of you have no doubt seen your homes from space using a program called Google Earth™. But did you know you could do a lot more with the right data? In fact I often use it to map atmospheric data in three-dimensions (3-D) around the globe. But one of the challenges I often face is that data comes from many different sources, such as NASA and NOAA satellites or ground-observation stations. This means the data is stored on computer disks all over the country and are named and organized according to different standards, requiring us to customize techniques for producing accurate visualizations in one, 3-D display of the Earth. We do this in order to analyze atmospheric relationships more easily because many weather phenomena arise from physical interactions, both horizontally and vertically, in the global circulation.A big part of atmospheric research relies on using computer models to simulate what our atmosphere will do under different conditions. A great example of this is the data used to prepare the daily weather forecast. This data originates from weather forecasting models that calculate atmospheric motions using the world’s fastest supercomputers. But how do we know these forecasts are accurate? Researchers can verify a model's performance by visualizing one of the variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, or air pressure and then using color shading, contour curves, and wind \"barbs\" to graph that data. Then they overlay the observations from NASA satellites such as cloud-top imagery, cloud-top temperature, and vertical distributions of clouds and aerosols, with the graph (it can be challenging to synchronize the data display as these times usually don't match). After this process, the display confirms the model's accuracy. This method is used to study many atmospheric events, such as timing of a storm system, precipitation, or the direction of dust or smoke transport. || ", "hits": 88 }, { "id": 4375, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4375/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-10-02T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Garbage Patch Visualization Experiment", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.You may have heard of \"ocean garbage patches,\" areas in the ocean where litter and debris concentrates. This might stir up a vivid image of large blanketed areas of trash on the ocean surface that are easy to spot. But that’s not the case. Much of the debris consists of smaller pieces of plastic that are always moving and changing with the ocean currents, waves and winds. These can be difficult to see and predict. We set out to explore the processes and interactions that cause debris to flow to these patches using buoy and model data, and created a visualization based on our results. || ", "hits": 136 }, { "id": 4365, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4365/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-09-30T12:00:00-04:00", "title": "Airborne in the Arctic", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.Four turboprop engines roar to life under the autumnal Alaskan sun, and we begin to taxi to the main runway of Eielson Air Force Base. After extensive pre-flight configurations, our science payload is primed for our eight-hour mission. Without delay, the engines’ roar becomes a howl as we hurtle down the nearly three-mile stretch of runway until that near-weightless moment we become airborne. Our mission into the clouds of the arctic is underway.Clouds are important drivers of Earth’s climate by regulating the amount of sunlight that is absorbed at the ground versus what is reflected back into space. You’ve probably experienced this firsthand when sitting outside on a hot and sunny summer day when a fluffy cumulus cloud crosses the sky between you and the sun. The respite that you feel from the heat of the sun’s rays means that that energy is no longer reaching you at the surface. At the lower latitudes where most of us live, these thick, stratiform and cumuliform clouds have a cooling effect because the white cloud reflects the sun’s energy back to space instead of being absorbed by the dark brown soil, green trees and plants, or the blue ocean waters. The story is much more complicated at the high latitudes where the frozen ice surface is also very bright white and reflective. Under these conditions, clouds can actually have a net warming effect because they reflect a similar or smaller amount of the incoming sunlight, but also trap more of the outgoing heat radiation and keep it close to the surface (like a blanket.)The exact balance between heating and cooling depends on the cloud properties - droplet number and size - and where the clouds are located in the atmosphere (high or low altitude as well as overlying dark water or bright ice.) Unraveling these effects is important for understanding how the Earth’s radiation balance and climate exist now and how they are likely to change in the future.Differentiating the impacts of low-level clouds versus Arctic sea ice on sunlight from space is hard, because to a passive satellite sensor orbiting many hundreds of kilometers above the Earth’s surface, both the ice and cloud look very similar. To best visualize this system, we must go to the Arctic with scientific research aircraft to measure the cloud properties just below, above, and within the clouds themselves. This was precisely the motivation behind the NASA Arctic Radiation – IceBridge Sea and Ice Experiment (ARISE), which was conducted in the Alaskan Arctic from September-October, 2014.ARISE carried out 14 science flights aboard the NASA Wallops Flight Facility C-130 Hercules aircraft, which was outfitted with a comprehensive suite of scientific instrumentation including a laser altimeter for measuring the sea ice surface properties, in situ cloud probes, and a sun photometer and two radiometers (SSFR, BBR) for measuring the surface, aerosol, and cloud radiative properties. An example 8-hour flight track is shown for the September 7th science flight in the Google Map below. The aircraft was based at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, AK, and began each flight by transiting approximately 2 hours north to the vicinity of the ice edge in the Beaufort Sea. On the 7th, the aircraft flew a series of parallel, horizontal legs to cover a single satellite grid box of the overflying NASA Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite. These measurements help CERES scientists to understand how small-scale variability in ice and cloud extent and properties affect their satellite-based retrievals. Google map showing the flight track of the NASA C-130 aircraft during a research flight conducted on 7 September 2014 north of the Alaskan coast. Before wrapping up the research flight on the 7th and beginning our 2-hour transit back to Fairbanks, we descended into the low-level clouds to measure their microphysical properties with the in situ cloud probes. The video below shows what it’s like to measure an Arctic cloud from inside it! The left side of the video shows the real-time data time series from our research instruments that we are continuously monitoring in flight. The top-right imagery is from the forward-facing camera in the C-130 cockpit. The bottom-right imagery is from the downward-facing, nadir camera mounted on the bottom of the aircraft. || ", "hits": 15 }, { "id": 4363, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4363/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-09-29T18:00:00-04:00", "title": "Notes from the Underground", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.I'm a hydrologist, which means I study how water moves around on land. Well, “on land” isn’t exactly right. It turns out that most of the interesting processes happen beneath the land surface, hidden from view. You might think, for example, that rivers fill from above — it rains and the water that doesn't sink into the ground runs off into the rivers. But in fact, about 80 percent of the water in rivers comes from underground. Rain soaks into the ground, adding water to the water table. When the water table rises to where it intersects with the land surface (on the side of a hill or even gently sloping \"flat\" land), the water penetrates through to the surface and runs downhill. Eventually, the flowing water carves out a ditch and you have a stream and ultimately a river.Let me show you what I mean: || ", "hits": 19 }, { "id": 4361, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4361/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-09-28T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Does What Happens in the Arctic Stay in the Arctic?", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.It all began with my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Benner. Back then my school had a weather station and one day she had asked me to collect wind speed and temperature data. I soon found myself in charge of the morning weather forecast and soon this was my favorite part of the day. Little did I know that in the years that would follow, I’d pursue my passion for clouds and meteorology to become a research scientist at NASA. Working at NASA is every bit as cool as it sounds! Everyday is different and I always find myself working with new scientific tools to uncover mysteries about our planet Earth. Lately I’ve been studying the cryosphere, or the world’s frozen places, where I’m using scientific visualizations to understand the impacts of climate change in the Arctic. In particular I’m focusing on melting sea ice to understand how it affects Arctic cloud formation.Arctic clouds are made up of tiny liquid droplets and ice particles that form from condensation and then freezing of water vapor. Water vapor is a necessary ingredient for Arctic cloud formation, and evaporation from the Arctic Ocean can serve as an important source of water vapor. But when sea ice sits on the Arctic Ocean it acts as a lid that prevents evaporation and may limit Arctic cloud formation. Over the past decade the amount of Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically and we think this trend may be influencing Arctic cloud formation.I created a visualization showing the hypothesized response of clouds to melting in sea ice (below). The difference between the left panel, \"Current Conditions,\" and the right panel, \"Future Conditions,\" is that less sea ice in the future leads to more evaporation, and more evaporation leads to more water vapor and increased cloudiness. This hypothesis is where I base my research, using state-of-the-art NASA satellite instruments including CALIPSO and CloudSAT. || ", "hits": 47 }, { "id": 4362, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4362/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-09-28T14:00:00-04:00", "title": "Dust in the Wind", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: the Earth Science Week 2015 page.Each year, millions of tons of dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa is swept up into the atmosphere. The dust travels across the Atlantic Ocean, with some of it reaching as far as the Amazon Rainforest. African dust contains phosphorus, which is an important nutrient for plants, so each year the Amazon Rainforest is fertilized by dust blown all the way from Africa! We created this data visualization to tell the incredible story of this great migration.To create this visualization, I used data from NASA’s CALIPSO satellite, which measures aerosols in the atmosphere. Using Autodesk Maya and Pixar’s Renderman software (the same software Pixar uses to make movies), I created a virtual Earth with vertical walls for each time the CALIPSO satellite passed over the dust cloud. Each wall has a picture (we call them \"textures\") that represents the data collected by the satellite at that location. Each wall slices through the dust cloud, and shows us a cross-sectional view of dust distribution in the atmosphere. Although dust clouds can be seen in satellite imagery as hazy brown sections, it’s hard to determine their altitude. Knowing the height at which dust travels will help scientists determine where the dust will go, how it moves at different altitudes and how it will interact with the Earth’s climate. CALIPSO allows scientists to clearly see the shape of a dust cloud in three dimensions.The second section of the visualization describes dust flux, or how much dust flows through a specific region over a period of time. To visualize flux, I used a particle system in Autodesk Maya that creates particles at a rate and velocity relative to the flux value for a region at each time step. As the flux value increases, additional particles are created and they move faster. As flux goes down, fewer particles are created and they move slower. The result is a particle cloud that changes shape with the seasons as flux values go up and down. || ", "hits": 35 }, { "id": 40259, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/svsdb-esw2015index/", "result_type": "Gallery", "release_date": "2015-09-28T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Science Week 2015: Visualizing Earth Systems (Oct. 11-17)", "description": "This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond, and includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. It's our hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold.ESW is an initiative of the American Geosciences Institute (AGI). NASA is a partner in ESW, collaborating with AGI's Center for Science and Society and the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES).", "hits": 11 }, { "id": 40240, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/svsdbfor-educatorsindex/", "result_type": "Gallery", "release_date": "2015-07-22T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "For Educators", "description": "No description available.", "hits": 0 }, { "id": 4272, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4272/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2015-02-09T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "What Would have Happened to the Ozone Layer if Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been Regulated? (UPDATED)", "description": "World Avoided Ozone Full AnimationThis video is also available on our YouTube channel. || world_avoided_robinson.1830_print.jpg (1024x576) [70.0 KB] || world_avoided_robinson.1830_searchweb.png (180x320) [38.8 KB] || world_avoided_robinson.1830_thm.png (80x40) [4.7 KB] || full_movie (1920x1080) [0 Item(s)] || world_avoided_robinson_1080.mp4 (1920x1080) [26.3 MB] || world_avoided_robinson_1080.webm (1920x1080) [7.2 MB] || world_avoided_robinson_4272.pptx [27.2 MB] || world_avoided_robinson_4272.key [29.8 MB] || world_avoided_robinson_1080.mp4.hwshow || ", "hits": 156 }, { "id": 40176, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/ozone-hole/", "result_type": "Gallery", "release_date": "2014-09-08T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Ozone Hole", "description": "Visualizations and narrated videos about stratospheric ozone, for educators and the press.", "hits": 259 }, { "id": 11436, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11436/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-01-30T11:00:00-05:00", "title": "Disk Detective: Search for Planetary Habitats", "description": "A new NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The site is led and funded by NASA and developed by the Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. WISE, located in Earth orbit and designed to survey the entire sky in infrared light, completed two scans between 2010 and 2011. It took detailed measurements of more than 745 million objects, representing the most comprehensive survey of the sky at mid-infrared wavelengths currently available. Astronomers have used computers to search this haystack of data for planet-forming environments and narrowed the field to about a half-million sources that shine brightly in the infrared, indicating they may be \"needles\": dust-rich circumstellar disks that are absorbing their star's light and reradiating it as heat. Planets form and grow within these disks. But galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids also glow in the infrared, which stymies automated efforts to identify planetary habitats. Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in the form of brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip book and then classify the object based on simple criteria, such as whether the image is round or includes multiple objects. By collecting this information, astronomers will be able to assess which sources should be explored in greater detail. The project aims to find two types of developing planetary environments. The first, known as young stellar object disks, typically are less than 5 million years old, contain large quantities of gas, and are often found in or near young star clusters. For comparison, our own solar system is 4.6 billion years old. The other type of habitat is called a debris disk. These systems tend to be older than 5 million years, possess little or no gas, and contain belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts found in our own solar system. Vega and Fomalhaut, two of the brightest stars in the sky, host debris disks. Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. || ", "hits": 38 }, { "id": 4134, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4134/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2014-01-16T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "Groundwater Depletion in India Revealed by GRACE -Extended", "description": "Scientists using data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) have found that the groundwater beneath Northern India has been receding by as much as one foot per year over the past decade. After examining many environmental and climate factors, the team of hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. concluded that the loss is almost entirely due to human consumption.Groundwater comes from the natural percolation of precipitation and other surface waters down through Earth's soil and rock, accumulating in aquifers - cavities and layers of porous rock, gravel, sand, or clay. In some subterranean reservoirs, the water may be thousands to millions of years old; in others, water levels decline and rise again naturally each year. Groundwater levels do not respond to changes in weather as rapidly as lakes, streams, and rivers do. So when groundwater is pumped for irrigation or other uses, recharge to the original levels can take months or years. The animation shown here depicts the change in groundwater levels with respect to the 2003-2009 mean, as measured each month from January 2003 to June 2013. || ", "hits": 108 }, { "id": 11165, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11165/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2012-12-21T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "GPM Presentation Resources", "description": "Media resources for educators and presentations. || ", "hits": 28 }, { "id": 11099, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11099/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2012-09-26T12:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Science Week: Career Spotlights", "description": "Join us during Earth Science Week 2012 to meet an incredible group of NASA Earth Explorers — from scientists and engineers, to multimedia producers, educators and writers.Find out about their careers, why and how they study the planet, and what their typical days are like. From video interviews to blog posts and more, there will be a variety of multimedia activities that will allow Explorers to tell their stories. Have questions of your own? Participate in live Twitter interviews and Google+ Hangouts held throughout the week, as well as during a radio interview and webinar in Spanish.On October 18, learn about the many contributions of women at NASA to Earth science as part of Female Geoscientists Day.The 2012 NASA ESW website will be your one-stop-source for Earth science careers and resources during ESW and beyond. There you will find a collection of articles, information about events, links to blog posts, transcripts of Twitter interviews, and educational products in English and Spanish. || ", "hits": 15 }, { "id": 3938, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3938/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2012-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Biosphere Data 2000 through 2004", "description": "The SeaWiFS instrument aboard the SeaStar satellite has been collecting ocean data since 1997. By monitoring the color of reflected light via satellite, scientists can determine how successfully plant life is photosynthesizing. A measurement of photosynthesis is essentially a measurement of successful growth, and growth means successful use of ambient carbon. This animation represents nearly a decade's worth of data taken by the SeaWiFS instrument, showing the abundance of life in the sea and along the Western seaboard of the United States. Dark blue represents warmer areas where there is little life due to lack of nutrients, and greens and reds represent cooler nutrient-rich areas. The nutrient-rich areas include coastal regions where cold water rises from the sea floor bringing nutrients along and areas at the mouths of rivers where the rivers have brought nutrients into the ocean from the land. The nutrient-rich waters contribute to some of the oxygen-poor pockets of the seas called dead zones. || ", "hits": 15 }, { "id": 10911, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10911/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2012-02-05T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "African-American History Month Profiles", "description": "In observance of National African American History Month and Engineers Week, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland will host a live webcast for K-12 teachers and students. Students will interact live with African-American engineers and scientists who will discuss what sparked their career choices and how students can prepare for future careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. This webcast occurs on Feb. 22, 2012, at 1 p.m. EST. During the month of February GSFC will release two videos featuring Dr. Aprille Ericsson and James Fraction. We want you to actually see what engineers do during the day. This is a great opportunity for educators and students to learn more about engineering careers at NASA. || ", "hits": 22 }, { "id": 3870, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3870/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T23:00:00-04:00", "title": "African Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "From space, we can understand fires in ways that are impossible from the ground. The MODIS instrument onboard the Terra and Aqua satellite, was specifically designed to detect fires. As a result, it can see both smaller fires and a wide range of fires from cool grass fires to raging forest fires. Burning carbon particles both on the tiny soot particles in the flame and on the fuel itself emit a very specific wavelength of light, 3.8 to 4 microns. NASA research has contributed to much improved detection of fire for scientific purposes using satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems. This has helped advance our understanding of the impacts of fire in many areas of earth science, including atmospheric chemistry and the impacts on protected areas. This research has led to the development of a rapid response system widely used throughout the world for both natural resource management and for firefighting by providing near real-time information. The visualization shows fires detected in Africa from July 2002 through July 2011. Africa has more abundant burning than any other continent. MODIS observations have shown that some 70 percent of the world's fires occur in Africa alone. \"It's incredibly satisfying to see such a long record of fires visualized,\" said Chris Justice, a scientist from the University of Maryland who leads NASA's effort to use MODIS data to study the world's fires. \"It's not only exciting visually, but what you see here is a very good representation of the data scientists use to understand the global distribution of fires and to determine where and how fires are responding to climate change and population growth.\"More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. || ", "hits": 20 }, { "id": 3869, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3869/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T19:00:00-04:00", "title": "Boreal Forest Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "NASA has released a series of new visualizations that show the locations of the millions of fires detected by key fire-monitoring instruments on NASA satellites over the last decade. This visualization shows fire observations made by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites in Europe and Asia from July 2002 through July 2011. \"It's incredibly satisfying to see such a long record of fires visualized,\" said Chris Justice, a scientist from the University of Maryland who leads NASA's effort to use MODIS data to study the world's fires. \"It's not only exciting visually, but what you see here is a very good representation of the data scientists use to understand the global distribution of fires and to determine where and how fires are responding to climate change and population growth.\"More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) is available at https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/near-real-time/firms. || ", "hits": 29 }, { "id": 3871, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3871/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T19:00:00-04:00", "title": "Australia Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "From space, we can understand fires in ways that are impossible from the ground. The MODIS instrument onboard the Terra and Aqua satellite, was specifically designed to detect fires. This visualization shows fire detections from July 2002 through July 2011. The visualization also includes vegetation and snow cover data to show how fires respond to seasonal changes. The tour begins in Australia in 2002 by showing a network of massive grassland fires spreading across interior Australia as well as the greener Eucalyptus forests in the northern and eastern part of the continent.More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. || ", "hits": 18 }, { "id": 3872, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3872/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T19:00:00-04:00", "title": "South American Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "From space, we can understand fires in ways that are impossible from the ground. NASA research has contributed to much improved detection of fire for scientific purposes using satellite remote sensing and geographic information systems. This visualization of South America shows fire observations made by MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites . South America exhibits a steady flickering of fire across much of the Amazon rainforest with peaks of activity in September and November. Almost all of the fires in the Amazon are the direct result of human activity, including slash-and-burn agriculture, because the high moisture levels in the region prevent inhibit natural fires from occurring.More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. || ", "hits": 31 }, { "id": 3873, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3873/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T19:00:00-04:00", "title": "United States Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "From space, we can understand fires in ways that are impossible from the ground. NASA has released a series of new visualizations that show fires detected by key fire-monitoring instruments on NASA satellites over the last decade. The visualizations show fire observations made by MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites. The visualization also includes vegetation and snow cover data to show how fires respond to seasonal changes. \"It's incredibly satisfying to see such a long record of fires visualized,\" said Chris Justice, a scientist from the University of Maryland who leads NASA's effort to use MODIS data to study the world's fires. \"It's not only exciting visually, but what you see here is a very good representation of the data scientists use to understand the global distribution of fires and to determine where and how fires are responding to climate change and population growth.\" North America is a region where fires are comparatively rare. North American fires make up just 2 percent of the world's burned area each year. The fires that receive the most attention in the United States, the uncontrolled forest fires in the West, are less visible than the wave of agricultural fires prominent in the Southeast and along the Mississippi River Valley, but some of the large wildfires that struck Texas earlier this spring are visible.More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. || ", "hits": 69 }, { "id": 3868, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3868/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2011-10-18T01:00:00-04:00", "title": "Global Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI", "description": "This visualization leads viewers on a narrated global tour of fire detections beginning in July 2002 and ending July 2011. The visualization also includes vegetation and snow cover data to show how fires respond to seasonal changes. The tour begins in Australia in 2002 by showing a network of massive grassland fires spreading across interior Australia as well as the greener Eucalyptus forests in the northern and eastern part of the continent. The tour then shifts to Asia where large numbers of agricultural fires are visible first in China in June 2004, then across a huge swath of Europe and western Russia in August, and then across India and Southeast Asia through the early part of 2005. It moves next to Africa, the continent that has more abundant burning than any other. MODIS observations have shown that some 70 percent of the world's fires occur in Africa alone. In what's a fairly average burning season, the visualization shows a huge outbreak of savanna fires during the dry season in Central Africa in July, August, and September of 2006, driven mainly by agricultural activities but also by the fact that the region experiences more lightning than anywhere else in the world. The tour shifts next to South America where a steady flickering of fire is visible across much of the Amazon rainforest with peaks of activity in September and November of 2009. Almost all of the fires in the Amazon are the direct result of human activity, including slash-and-burn agriculture, because the high moisture levels in the region prevent inhibit natural fires from occurring. It concludes in North America, a region where fires are comparatively rare. North American fires make up just 2 percent of the world's burned area each year. The fires that receive the most attention in the United States, the uncontrolled forest fires in the West, are less visible than the wave of agricultural fires prominent in the Southeast and along the Mississippi River Valley, but some of the large wildfires that struck Texas earlier this spring are visible. More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. || ", "hits": 28 }, { "id": 10842, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10842/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2011-10-10T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Science Week 2011", "description": "This year's Earth Science Week theme is \"Our Ever-changing Earth.\" These short introductory videos are designed to give educators a brief tour of what resources NASA has to offer. For more information and resources, visit the Earth Science Week website.This page contains video segments with NASA scientists Gavin Schmidt, William Lau, and Waleed Abdalati. || ", "hits": 10 }, { "id": 10814, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10814/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2011-10-06T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Science Week 2011 Kickoff", "description": "This year's Earth Science Week theme is \"Our Ever-changing Earth.\" These short introductory videos are designed to give educators a brief tour of what resources NASA has to offer. For more information and resources, visit the Earth Science Week website. || ", "hits": 6 }, { "id": 10680, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10680/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2010-10-11T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Professional Development Presentation - Hurricanes", "description": "In 2006, Hurricane scientist Dr. Jeff Halverson, and NASA Education specialist, John Leck, provided a full day professional development workshop for teachers in the Philadelpia region. Halverson and Leck explored the science behind hurricanes with these educators, along with the many educational resources available to accompany this field of Earth Science. || ", "hits": 12 }, { "id": 10664, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10664/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2010-09-28T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Earth Science Week 2010 - Exploring Energy", "description": "\"Exploring Energy\" is the theme of this year's Earth Science Week, Oct. 10-16. The American Geological Institute hosts Earth Science Week annually in cooperation with various sponsors to engage people in Earth science and encourage stewardship of Earth. NASA develops, deploys and manages an array of satellites that monitor and measure energy as it flows into, through and out of the Earth system. During Earth Science Week, a series of short videos will be posted to NASA's Earth Science Week website. Aimed at educators, the videos will present activities for different grade levels that highlight how NASA explores Earth's energy, such as the energy that fuels hurricanes.For archived Earth Science Week material, please visit the Earth Science Educator Resource Gallery.For additional multimedia resources, please check out the Energy Essentials Gallery. || ", "hits": 20 }, { "id": 3738, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3738/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-07-23T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "2007 Greenland Melt Season Study", "description": "The Greenland ice sheet has been the focus of attention recently because of increasing melt in response to regional climate change. Several different remote sensing data products have been used to study surface and near-surface melt characteristics of the Greenland ice sheet for the 2007 melt season when record melt extent and runoff occurred. Here, MODIS daily land surface temperature and a special diurnal melt product, derived from QuikSCAT scatterometer data, measure the evolution of melt on the ice sheet. Although these daily products are sensitive to different geophysical features, they show excellent correspondence when surface melt is present. This animation displays these two geophysical data products of the Greenland ice sheet side-by-side, showing MODIS data on the left side and QuikSCAT data on the right. The 2007 melt season is shown twice. In the first sequence, MODIS surface temperature is compared with several categories of QuikSCAT melt between March 15th and October 13th, 2010. During this sequence, active melt detected by QuikSCAT is shown in light blue, reduced melt is medium blue, and completed melt is dark blue. For the MODIS, surface temperature is shown with the color scale — red indicates a surface temperature greater than -1 degree Celsius. As MODIS shows warmer surface temperature as the melt season progresses, QuikSCAT consistently identifies the corresponding melt.In the second sequence, the MODIS and QuikSCAT melted regions of the ice sheet were accumulated during the melt season. QuikSCAT captures melt earlier, and then melt is detected by MODIS shortly afterward at a higher spatial resolution. The final result (frame) shows the seasonal melt extent which was consistently delineated by both sensors. The cross-verification of these independent measurements, by two different instruments on different satellites, provides a higher confidence level in the melt observations, reducing the uncertainty in climate assessment of Greenland melt. || ", "hits": 26 }, { "id": 3746, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3746/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-07-01T20:00:00-04:00", "title": "Hurricane Alex Makes Landfall in Northeastern Mexico", "description": "NASA's TRMM spacecraft observed this view of Hurricane Alex on June 30, 2010 at 2103 UTC (5:02 PM EST). At this time, Hurricane Alex was increasing in intensity and had become a category 2 storm with estimated winds at 75 knots (~86.4 mph) and a pressure reading of 962 mb. The rain structure is taken by TRMM's Tropical Microwave Imager (TMI) and TRMM's Precitation Radar (PR) instruments. The TMI rainfall analysis shows that Alex had a well defined eye containing powerful thounderstorms that were dropping extreme amounts of rain. The clouds are taken by TRMM's visible-infrared radiometer (VIRS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-13) infrared instrument. TRMM looks underneath of the storm's clouds to reveal the underlying rain structure. The colored isosurface under the clouds show the rain seen by the PR instrument. Areas of extremely heavy rainfall are colored in red. Heavy rainfall are colored in yellow, moderate rainfall are colored in green, and light rain are in blue. || ", "hits": 42 }, { "id": 3745, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3745/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-07-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Hurricane Katrina 3D Stereoscopic Viewfinder Image", "description": "NASA's TRMM spacecraft observed this view of Hurricane Katrina on August 28, 2005. At the time the data was collected, Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane, the most destructive and deadly. The cloud cover data was taken by TRMM's Visible and Infrared Scanner (VIRS), with additional data from the GOES spacecraft. The rain structure data was taken by TRMM's Tropical Microwave Imager (TMI). This view looks underneath the storm's clouds to reveal the underlying rain structure. This stereoscopic still image was created from a previous visualization and is intended for viewing through a special NASA Earth Science Viewfinder available through NASA Headquarters. Below, we include an anaglyph version, a printable viewfinder version, and the individual left eye and right eye views. || ", "hits": 31 }, { "id": 3719, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3719/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "MERRA Specific Humidity", "description": "Retrospective-analyses (or reanalyses) have been a critical tool in studying weather and climate variability for the last 15 years. Reanalyses blend the continuity and breadth of output data of a numerical model with the constraint of vast quantities of observational data. The result is a long-term continuous data record. The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications was developed to support NASA's Earth science objectives, by applying the state-of-the-art GMAO data assimilation system that includes many modern observing systems (such as EOS) in a climate framework.The MERRA time period covers the modern era of remotely sensed data, from 1979 through the present, and the special focus of the atmospheric assimilation is the hydrological cycle.The time period covered by the visualization is the months of May, June, and July of 1988 and 1993, two years with contrasting extreme weather events during the summer: a drought through the midwestern states of the US in 1988, and heavy rains and flooding through the same region in 1993.This visualization shows the specific humidity dataset produced by MERRA, up to a geopotential height of 20 km. The height coordinate is greatly exaggerated. Both opacity and color are driven by the data value.This animation was created as part of a presentation for the Nasa Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall display. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. For the full presentation, see the link below. || ", "hits": 11 }, { "id": 3732, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3732/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "MERRA Relative Humidity", "description": "Retrospective-analyses (or reanalyses) have been a critical tool in studying weather and climate variability for the last 15 years. Reanalyses blend the continuity and breadth of output data of a numerical model with the constraint of vast quantities of observational data. The result is a long-term continuous data record. The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications was developed to support NASA's Earth science objectives, by applying the state-of-the-art GMAO data assimilation system that includes many modern observing systems (such as EOS) in a climate framework.The MERRA time period covers the modern era of remotely sensed data, from 1979 through the present, and the special focus of the atmospheric assimilation is the hydrological cycle.The time period covered by the visualization is the months of May, June, and July of 1988 and 1993, two years with contrasting extreme weather events during the summer: a drought through the midwestern states of the US in 1988, and heavy rains and flooding through the same region in 1993.This visualization shows the relative humidity dataset produced by MERRA, up to a geopotential height of 20 km. The height coordinate is greatly exaggerated. Both opacity and color are driven by the data value.This animation was created as part of a presentation for the Nasa Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall display. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. For the full presentation, see the link below. || ", "hits": 43 }, { "id": 3733, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3733/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "MERRA Wind", "description": "Retrospective-analyses (or reanalyses) have been a critical tool in studying weather and climate variability for the last 15 years. Reanalyses blend the continuity and breadth of output data of a numerical model with the constraint of vast quantities of observational data. The result is a long-term continuous data record. The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications was developed to support NASA's Earth science objectives, by applying the state-of-the-art GMAO data assimilation system that includes many modern observing systems (such as EOS) in a climate framework.The MERRA time period covers the modern era of remotely sensed data, from 1979 through the present, and the special focus of the atmospheric assimilation is the hydrological cycle.The time period covered by the visualization is the months of May, June, and July of 1988 and 1993, two years with contrasting extreme weather events during the summer: a drought through the midwestern states of the US in 1988, and heavy rains and flooding through the same region in 1993.This visualization shows the combined U and V components of wind at three different pressure levels: 850 mb, 500 mb, and 300 mb. The pressure coordinate is greatly exaggerated.This animation was created as part of a presentation for the Nasa Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall display. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. For the full presentation, see the link below. || ", "hits": 47 }, { "id": 3734, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3734/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "MERRA Combined Liquid Water and Ice Mixing Ratios", "description": "Retrospective-analyses (or reanalyses) have been a critical tool in studying weather and climate variability for the last 15 years. Reanalyses blend the continuity and breadth of output data of a numerical model with the constraint of vast quantities of observational data. The result is a long-term continuous data record. The Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications was developed to support NASA's Earth science objectives, by applying the state-of-the-art GMAO data assimilation system that includes many modern observing systems (such as EOS) in a climate framework.The MERRA time period covers the modern era of remotely sensed data, from 1979 through the present, and the special focus of the atmospheric assimilation is the hydrological cycle.The time period covered by the visualization is the months of May, June, and July of 1988 and 1993, two years with contrasting extreme weather events during the summer: a drought through the midwestern states of the US in 1988, and heavy rains and flooding through the same region in 1993.This visualization shows the combined liquid water and ice mixing ratio dataset produced by MERRA, roughly corresponding to cloud cover, up to an geopotential height of 20 km. The height coordinate is greatly exaggerated. Both opacity and color are driven by the data value.This animation was created as part of a presentation for the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall display. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. For the full presentation, see the link below. || ", "hits": 10 }, { "id": 3730, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3730/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-22T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Lunar Topography: ULCN versus LOLA", "description": "This animation illustrates the dramatic improvement in our knowledge of the Moon's terrain made possible by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft. A LOLA digital elevation map compiled in late 2009 is compared to the Unified Lunar Control Network (ULCN) 2005, a painstakingly constructed map based on the best available data at the time, including imagery from the Clementine, Apollo, Mariner 10, and Galileo missions as well as Earth-based observations.The height of the terrain is color-coded, with blues and greens representing low altitudes and reds representing high altitudes. The LOLA data used to create this media is available to the public in the LOLA archive of the PDS Geosciences node. || ", "hits": 358 }, { "id": 3731, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3731/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-21T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "LOLA: Lunar Topography in Natural Color", "description": "This animation is a brief tour of several prominent features of the Moon's terrain: Tycho crater, the south pole, and the South Pole-Aitken basin. It is match-moved to a companion piece showing the terrain elevations in false color.This is an update of animation 3594, which was produced before the launch of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Except for the Tycho crater inset, the elevation map in this updated version is based entirely on early results of the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter onboard LRO.The surface appearance is derived from photographs taken by the Clementine spacecraft. Although it shows the visible surface in natural color, this animation does not depict realistic sunlight and shadows. This is especially significant near the poles, where certain parts of the terrain can be in permanent shadow and would never be fully visible in the manner depicted here. || ", "hits": 316 }, { "id": 3723, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3723/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-18T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "NCCS Hyperwall Show: GEOS-5 Modeled Clouds at 5-km Resolution (Flat Map)", "description": "This visualization shows clouds from a simulation using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Verison 5 (GEOS5). The global atmospheric simulation ran at a resolution of 5-km per grid cell and covered a period from Feb 2, 2010 through Feb 22, 2010. The results of the simulation were written out at 30 minute intervals. This is a high-resolution non-hydrostatic global model.This visualization was created for display on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. This movie was rendered at this high resolution, then diced up into images to be displayed on each screen.A similar, lower resolution visualization is available in entry #3724. The lower resolution version is for comparison to current operational model resolution output. When displaying these visualizations on the hyperwall, we sometimes show them in a checkerboard pattern with alternating 5-km and quarter-degree tiles for easy comparison. We chose to stretch the image to fit the hyperwall aspect rather than cropping or adding black bars. || ", "hits": 198 }, { "id": 3724, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3724/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-18T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "NCCS Hyperwall Show: GEOS-5 Modeled Clouds at One Quarter Degree (28-km) Resolution (Flat Map)", "description": "This visualization shows clouds from a simulation using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Verison 5 (GEOS-5). The global atmospheric simulation ran at a resolution of one quarter degree (or about 28-km) per grid cell and covered a period from Feb 3, 2010 through Feb 13, 2010. The results of the simulation were written out at 30 minute intervals. This model is a high-resolution non-hydrostatic global model.This visualization was created for display on NASA's Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels across by 2304 pixels down. This movie was rendered at this resolution, then diced up into images to be displayed on each screen.A similar, higher resolution visualization is available in entry #3723. This lower resolution version is for comparison to current operational model resolution output. || ", "hits": 27 }, { "id": 3725, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3725/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-18T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "NCCS Hyperwall Show: Earth Observing Fleet with GEOS-5 Clouds", "description": "A newer version of this visualization can be found here.This visualization is an update to a previous visualization of NASA's Earth observing fleet of spacecraft. Also incuded in this version are a couple of commercial spacecraft as well as the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The spacecraft ephemerides are from February 2010.The clouds are from a simulation using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Verison 5 (GEOS-5). The global atmospheric simulation ran at a resolution of 7-km per grid cell and covered a period from Feb 2, 2010 through Feb 22, 2010. The results of the simulation were written out at 30 minute intervals.This visualization was created for display on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) hyperwall. This is a set of tiled high definition displays consisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels across by 2304 pixels down. This movie was rendered at this high resolution, then diced up into images to be displayed on each screen. || ", "hits": 61 }, { "id": 3728, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3728/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-17T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Magellan: Venus False-Color Terrain", "description": "This animation is a brief tour of the global terrain of the planet Venus as revealed by radar onboard the Magellan spacecraft. The height of the terrain is color-coded, with blues and greens representing low altitudes and reds representing high altitudes. Highlighted are two large \"continents,\" or highlands, Aphrodite Terra and Ishtar Terra; the Maxwell Montes mountain range; and Maat Mons, a large, currently dormant volcano.Magellan arrived at Venus in August of 1990 and spent four years there collecting data. The elevation map used here was created with data collected during the first mapping cycle. Many of the coverage gaps, represented here by black pixels, were filled in during later mapping cycles. || ", "hits": 367 }, { "id": 3729, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3729/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-15T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Byrd Glacier", "description": "LIMA presents the first-ever, true-color, high-resolution view of Antarctica. Prepared from 1100 Landsat-7 images collected from 1999 to 2003, it provides scientists and non-scientists a stunning \"you are there\" view of the least familiar continent. Shown here are two perspectives of Byrd Glacier, one of the largest in Antarctica. The down-glacier view (above) looks northeastward and the up-glacier regional view (below) looks southward toward the South Pole which is 1050 km distant. The 15-meter resolution imagery is draped over the Radarsat Antarctic Mapping Project Digital Elevation Model Version 2. Byrd Glacier plunges through a deep valley in the Transatlantic Mountains and onto the Ross Ice Shelf, dropping more than 4,300 feet over a distance of 112 miles. It remains a distinct ice stream all the way to the edge of the shelf, some 260 miles from the foot of the mountains to the open sea. || ", "hits": 11 }, { "id": 3727, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3727/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-11T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "LOLA Lunar Topography in False Color", "description": "This animation is a brief tour of several prominent features of the Moon's terrain: Tycho crater, the south pole, and the South Pole-Aitken basin. The height of the terrain is color-coded, with blues and greens representing low altitudes and reds representing high altitudes. The view is match-moved to a companion piece showing the Moon in natural colors.This is an update of animation 3582, which was produced before the launch of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Except for the Tycho crater inset, the elevation map in this updated version is based entirely on early results of the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter onboard LRO. These results already represent a substantial improvement in our knowledge of the Moon's topography. || ", "hits": 426 }, { "id": 3667, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3667/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-03T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Ship Tracks Reveal Pollution's Effects on Clouds", "description": "NASA's MODIS satellite instrument is revealing that humans may be changing our planet's brightness. Pollution in the atmosphere creates smaller, brighter cloud droplets that reflect more sunlight back to space and may have a slight impact on global warming.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. || ", "hits": 71 }, { "id": 3722, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3722/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-06-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "NCCS Hyperwall Show: Push in with GEOS-5 Modeled Clouds at 3.5-km Global Resolution and 10 Minute Interval", "description": "This visualization shows clouds from a simulation using the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Verison 5 (GEOS-5). The global atmospheric simulation ran at 3.5 km per grid cell and covered a single day: January 2, 2009. The results of the simulation were written out at 10 minute intervals. Since there is only one day of simulation data, the sequence of clouds repeats several times. The white flash indicates the sequence is about to repeat.This version of the visualization was created for display on the NASA Center for Climate Science (NCCS.) hyperwall. This hyperwall is a set of 15 tiled high definition displays constisting of 5 displays across by 3 displays down. The full resolution of all combined displays is 6840 pixels accross by 2304 pixels down. This movie was rendered at full resolution, then diced up into images for display on each screen.This visualization is similar to a visualization shown at the Supercomputing 2009 conference available in entry #3659. The differences between that one and this one are: resolution, aspect ratio, and camera path (due to the aspect). || ", "hits": 16 }, { "id": 3720, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3720/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-12T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Annual Gradient Melt over Greenland 1979 Through 2009", "description": "The ice sheet melt extent is a daily (or every-other-day, prior to August 1987) estimate of the spatial extent of wet snow on the Greenland ice sheet derived from passive microwave satellite brightness temperature characteristics. This indicator of melt on each area of the ice sheet for each day of observation is physically based on the changes in microwave emission characteristics observable in data. Although it is not a direct measure of the snow wetness, it is representative of the amount of ice loss due to seasonal melting that occurs on the Greenland ice sheet.This animation is a time series showing the regions of the Greenland ice sheet where melt occurred for more than three days between May 1st and September 30th for each year. Areas in which melt occurred for longer time periods are shown in a darker red while those areas melted for fewer days are shown in lighter red. Areas melted three or less days during the year are not colored. || ", "hits": 155 }, { "id": 3721, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3721/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-12T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Annual Accumulated Melt over Greenland 1979 through 2009", "description": "The ice sheet melt extent is a daily (or every-other-day, prior to August, 1987) estimate of the spatial extent of wet snow on the Greenland ice sheet derived from passive microwave satellite brightness temperature characteristics. This indicator of melt on each area of the ice sheet for each day of observation is physically based on the changes in microwave emission characteristics observable in data.", "hits": 81 }, { "id": 3707, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3707/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Five Spheres - Land Changes through NDVI", "description": "Satellite data can be used to monitor the health of plant life from space. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) provides a simple numerical indicator of the health of vegetation which can be used to monitoring changes in vegetation over time. This animation shows the seasonal changes in vegetation by fading between average monthly NDVI data from 2004. This animation of land changes is match framed to animation id a003708, a003709, a003710, and a003711. || ", "hits": 90 }, { "id": 3708, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3708/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Five Spheres - Tropospheric Ozone", "description": "Satellite data can be used to monitor the health of the atmosphere from space. This animation of atmospheric changes is match framed to animation entries 3707, 3709, 3710, and 3711. This dataset shows tropospheric ozone, which is close to the ground and a component of pollution. This should be distinguished from high altitude (stratospheric) ozone which shields the Earth's surface from ultraviolet radiation.For more information about tropospheric ozone see the links below:http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/ozone_resource_page.htmlhttp://www.ozonelayer.noaa.gov/science/basics.htm || ", "hits": 46 }, { "id": 3709, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3709/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Five Spheres - Biosphere", "description": "Satellite data can be used to monitor the health of the biosphere from space. This animation of seasonal changes to the biosphere is match framed to animation entries 3707, 3708, 3710, and 3711. The SeaWiFS instrument is carried aboard the satellite OrbView-2, providing important information about the oceans, the land, and the life within them. On land, the dark greens show where there is abundant vegetation and tans show relatively sparse plant cover. In the oceans, red, yellow, and green pixels show dense phytoplankton blooms, those regions of the ocean that are the most productive over time, while blues and purples show where there is very little of the microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton. For most of the world's oceans, the most important things that influence its color are phytoplankton. Phytoplankton are very small, single-celled plants, generally smaller than the size of a pinhead that contain a green pigment called chlorophyll. All plants (on land and in the ocean) use chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and through the process known as photosynthesis convert water and carbon dioxide into new plant material and oxygen. Although microscopic, phytoplankton can bloom in such large numbers that they can change the color of the ocean to such a degree that we can measure that change from space. The basic principle behind the remote sensing of ocean color from space is this: the more phytoplankton in the water, the greener it is...the less phytoplankton, the bluer it is. For more information, visit http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/SeaWiFS/. || ", "hits": 82 }, { "id": 3710, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3710/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Five Spheres - Cryosphere", "description": "Sea ice is frozen seawater floating on the surface of the ocean. Some sea ice is semi-permanent, persisting from year to year, and some is seasonal, melting and refreezing from season to season. The sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent at the end of each summer and the remaining ice is called the perennial ice cover. The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) instrument on the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua satellite, provides data mapped to a polar stereographic grid at 12.5 km spatial resolution. This satellite data can be used to monitor the health of the cryosphere from space. This animation of sea ice changes in the Arctic is match framed to animation entries 3707, 3708, 3709, and 3711. Over the water, Arctic sea ice changes from day to day showing a running 3-day maximum sea ice concentration in the region where the concentration is greater than 15%. The blueish white color of the sea ice is derived from a 3-day running maximum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature. Over the terrain, monthly data from the seasonal Blue Marble Next Generation fades slowly from month to month.For more information about sea ice see http://nsidc.org/data/amsre or http://modis-snow-ice.gsfc.nasa.gov. || ", "hits": 24 }, { "id": 3711, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3711/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-05-01T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Five Spheres - Water", "description": "Satellite data can be used to observe the dramatic ebb and flow of the our planet's water system from space. This animation of QuikSCAT's sea surface winds is match framed to animation entries 3707, 3708, 3709, and 3710. The SeaWinds Scatterometer instrument on the QuikSCAT satellite captures the always moving and complex sea surface. The mission has also provided critical information for monitoring, modeling, forecasting and researching our atmosphere, ocean and climate.By any measure of success, the 10-year-old QuikSCAT mission is a unique national resource that has achieved and far surpassed its science objectives. Designed for a two-year lifetime, QuikSCAT has been used around the globe by the world's operational meteorological agencies to improve weather forecasts and identify the location, size and strength of hurricanes and other storms in the open ocean. More information on QuikSCAT is online at: http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index.cfm. || ", "hits": 21 }, { "id": 3692, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3692/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA CME Event of April 8, 2010 (Multiband)", "description": "This is a close-up view of the April 8 CME in ultraviolet light which reveals a wave (darker regions) expanding outward from the flare event. This movie creates a color image by combining filters for 211 Ångstroms (red), 193 Ångstroms (green) and 171 Ångstroms (blue). || ", "hits": 24 }, { "id": 3693, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3693/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA Zoom-In on Launching Filament (Bands 304, 171, 211)", "description": "As the AIA camera was activated, one of its first views was this fliament launching from the Sun. || ", "hits": 30 }, { "id": 3695, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3695/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA CME Event of April 8, 2010 Full Disk (Multiband)", "description": "This visualization is a full-disk view of the CME launched from the Sun on April 8, 2010. This is a 3-color image produced by combining three different filters from the AIA instrument: 211 (red), 193 (green), and 171 (blue). || ", "hits": 30 }, { "id": 3696, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3696/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Continuum Full Disk View - March 29, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of HMI images from SDO focuses on a large sunspot group of Solar Cycle 24. || ", "hits": 76 }, { "id": 3697, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3697/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Magnetogram Full Disk View - March 29, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of images from the HMI imager is processed to reveal the magnetic field structure (magnetogram). White locations represent a positive magnetic field value (north polarity) while black represents a negative magnetic field value (south polarity). Grey is zero magnetic field.The black and white region slightly above the center corresponds to a visible sunspot. Weaker magnetic regions are visible around the disk. || ", "hits": 51 }, { "id": 3703, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3703/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Continuum Sunspot Closeup - March 29, 2010", "description": "This is a close-up view of a large sunspot group visible as the HMI instrument turned on their imagers. || ", "hits": 25 }, { "id": 3704, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3704/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Continuum Sunspot Zoom-in - March 29, 2010", "description": "This is a zoom-in view of a large sunspot group visible as the HMI instrument turned on their imagers. || ", "hits": 34 }, { "id": 3705, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3705/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Magnetogram Sunspot Close-Up - March 29, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of images from the HMI imager is processed to reveal the magnetic field structure (magnetogram). White locations represent a positive magnetic field value (north polarity) while black represents a negative magnetic field value (south polarity). Grey is zero magnetic field.This version is a close-up view of a large sunspot group. || ", "hits": 39 }, { "id": 3706, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3706/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Magnetogram Sunspot Zoom-In - March 29, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of images from the HMI imager is processed to reveal the magnetic field structure (magnetogram). White locations represent a positive magnetic field value (north polarity) while black represents a negative magnetic field value (south polarity). Grey is zero magnetic field.This movie zooms-in on a large sunspot group. || ", "hits": 12 }, { "id": 3712, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3712/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Continuum Full Disk View - April 7, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of HMI images from SDO focuses on a large sunspot group of Solar Cycle 24. || ", "hits": 62 }, { "id": 3713, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3713/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Magnetogram Full Disk View - April 7, 2010", "description": "This early sequence of images from the HMI imager is processed to reveal the magnetic field structure (magnetogram). White locations represent a positive magnetic field value (north polarity) while black represents a negative magnetic field value (south polarity). Gray is zero magnetic field.Notice that the surface magnetic fields reveal much more structure than the white-light images in SDO/HMI Continuum Full Disk View - April 7, 2010. || ", "hits": 34 }, { "id": 3714, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3714/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/HMI Dopplergram Sunspot Close-Up - March 29, 2010", "description": "The dopplergram from SDO/HMI data shows the velocity of solar material on the line-of-sight. White pixels are moving away from the camera and black pixels are moving towards the camera. || ", "hits": 25 }, { "id": 3715, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3715/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA Close-up on Launching Filament (band 304)", "description": "A close-up view of the filament launch in the 304 band, which corresponds to a wavelength of about 304 Ångstroms. || ", "hits": 21 }, { "id": 3716, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3716/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA Full-Disk View of Launching Filament (Band 304)", "description": "Full disk view of a filament launch in the SDO AIA 304 band. || ", "hits": 50 }, { "id": 3717, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3717/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-21T14:15:00-04:00", "title": "SDO/AIA Zoom-out of Launching Filament (Band 304)", "description": "This view of the filament launch loops several times before pulling out to show the full solar disk. || ", "hits": 26 }, { "id": 3702, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3702/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-19T11:00:00-04:00", "title": "Swift Detects its 500th Gamma Ray Burst", "description": "The NASA Swift mission has detected 500 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to-date.This movie is presented as an all-sky map in a Hammer projection (Wikipedia). Each burst lights on the appropriate date and then fades to a green dot to emphasize the random distribution of GRBs on the sky.Another version of this visualization is available at Swift's 500 Gamma-ray Bursts. || ", "hits": 44 }, { "id": 3683, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3683/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Halloween 2003 Solar Storms: GOES/SXI X-ray view", "description": "Here is a view of the full solar disk during a two-week period in October and November of 2003 which exhibited some of the largest solar activity events since the advent of space-based solar observing. The GOES-12/Solar X-Ray Imager was experiencing significant problems during this time period and was offline during part of the opening and closing portions of this movie, which is why there is a significant number of black frames. Actual data collection began on October 28, 2003 and terminated on November 5, 2003.This movie is part of a series of movies with matching cadence designed to play synchronously with each other. The other movies in this series are Halloween 2003 Solar Storms: SOHO/EIT Ultraviolet, 195 angstromsHalloween 2003 Solar Storms: SOHO/EIT Ultraviolet, 304 angstromsHalloween 2003 Solar Storms: SOHO/MDI ContinuumHalloween 2003 Solar Storms: SOHO/MDI MagnetogramsHalloween 2003 Solar Storms: SOHO/EIT and SOHO/LASCO || ", "hits": 32 }, { "id": 3691, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3691/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-31T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "A Comparative View of the Sun: SDO/AIA 193 and SOHO/EIT 195", "description": "This movie compares the spatial and temporal resolutions of the SDO/AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly) imager to the SOHO/EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) imager. SOHO/EIT's highest resolution is 1024x1024 pixels with images taken about every 12 minutes for the 195 Ångstrom band. The SDO/AIA 193 band takes images at 4096x4096 pixels every twelve seconds!In this movie we can see the difference this makes for a closeup view of Active Region 1087. EIT reveals changes in the active region, which AIA reveals many details.This visualization is a companion piece to A Comparative View of the Sun: SDO/AIA 193 and STEREO-B/EUVI 195. || ", "hits": 54 }, { "id": 3698, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3698/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-29T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "AMSR-E Arctic Sea Ice: September 2009 to March 2010", "description": "Sea ice is frozen seawater floating on the surface of the ocean. Some sea ice is semi-permanent, persisting from year to year, and some is seasonal, melting and refreezing from season to season. The sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent at the end of each summer and the remaining ice is called the perennial ice cover.In this animation, the Arctic sea ice and seasonal land cover change progress through time, from September 1, 2009 when sea ice in the Arctic was near its minimum extent, through March 30, 2010. The animation plays at a rate of six frames per day or ten days per second. Over the water, Arctic sea ice changes from day to day showing a running 3-day maximum sea ice concentration in the region where the concentration is greater than 15%. The blueish white color of the sea ice is derived from a 3-day running maximum of the AMSR-E 89 GHz brightness temperature. Over the terrain, monthly data from the seasonal Blue Marble Next Generation fades slowly from month to month. || ", "hits": 22 }, { "id": 3690, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3690/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-28T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Releases Data to the Planetary Data System", "description": "On March 15, 2010, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) released its first installment of scientific data to NASA's public archive for planetary data, the Planetary Data System (PDS). This animation highlights several of the datasets made available through the PDS by the LOLA, LEND, and Diviner instruments on LRO. || ", "hits": 90 }, { "id": 3687, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3687/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Greenland Ice Sheet Mass Changes from NASA GSFC GRACE Mascon Solutions with Banded Color Scale", "description": "Luthcke, S.B., D.D. Rowlands, J.J. McCarthy, A. Arendt, T. Sabaka, J.P. Boy, F.G. Lemoine, \"Recent Changes of the Earth's Land Ice from GRACE, \" presented at 2009 Fall AGU, H13G-02 (693337), Dec. 14, 2009.The mass changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite range-rate observations for the period April 5, 2003 - July 25, 2009. The mass of the GIS has been computed at 10-day intervals and 200km spatial resolution from a regional high-resolution mascon solution (Luthcke and others, 2008 and 2006). The animation shows the change in mass referenced from April 5, 2003. The spatial variation in surface mass is shown in centimeters equivalent height of water. The time variation of the GIS mass is shown in the x-y plot insert with units of Gigatons.Corresponding author:Scott B. LuthckeNASA GSFCPlanetary Geodynamics Laboratory, Code 698Scott.B.Luthcke@nasa.gov || ", "hits": 19 }, { "id": 3694, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3694/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-24T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "A Comparative View of the Sun: SDO/AIA 193 and STEREO-B/EUVI 195", "description": "This movie compares the spatial and temporal resolutions of the SDO/AIA (Atmospheric Imaging Assembly) imager to the STEREO/EUVI (Extreme UltraViolet Imager) imager. STEREO-B/EUVI's highest resolution is 2048x2048 pixels with images taken about every 5 minutes for the 195 Ångstrom band. The SDO/AIA 193 band takes images at 4096x4096 pixels every twelve seconds!While STEREO's vantage point at this time is very different from SDO, we can still identify some features of the Active Region 1087 in these two views. EUVI shows the launch of the filament, while AIA reveals many finer details.This visualization is a companion piece to A Comparative View of the Sun: SDO/AIA 193 and SOHO/EIT 195. || ", "hits": 36 }, { "id": 3688, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3688/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-17T23:00:00-04:00", "title": "Shrimp-Like Creature Discovered at Windless Bight, Antarctica - 600 Feet Beneath Ice Sheet", "description": "At a depth of 600 feet beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet, a small shrimp-like creature managed to brighten up an otherwise gray polar day in late November 2009. This critter is a three-inch long Lyssianasid amphipod found beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, about 12.5 miles away from open water in the region called Windless Bight. NASA scientists were using a borehole camera to look back up towards the ice surface when they spotted this pinkish-orange creature swimming beneath the ice. || ", "hits": 83 }, { "id": 3689, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3689/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-17T17:00:00-04:00", "title": "Operation IceBridge Greenland Spring 2010 Flight Paths", "description": "Operation Ice Bridge is a six-year campaign of annual flights to each of Earth's polar regions. The first flights in March and April carried researchers over Greenland and the Arctic Ocean. This spring's Artic campaign, led by principal investigator Seelye Martin of the University of Washington, will begin the first sustained airborne research effort of its kind over the continent. Data collected by researchers will help scientists bridge the gap between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — which is operating the last of its three lasers — and ICESat-II, scheduled to launch in 2014.The Ice Bridge flights will help scientists maintain the record of changes to sea ice and ice sheets that have been collected since 2003 by ICESat. The flights will lack the continent-wide coverage that can be achieved by satellite, so researchers carefully select key target locations. But the flights will also turn up new information not possible from orbit, such as the shape of the terrain below the ice.Thirteen flights are scheduled and displayed in this visualization. || ", "hits": 14 }, { "id": 3685, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3685/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-15T23:00:00-04:00", "title": "Aqua/AIRS Carbon Dioxide, 2002-2009, With Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide Graph", "description": "This visualization is a time-series of the global distribution and variation of the concentration of mid-tropospheric carbon dioxide observed by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on the NASA Aqua spacecraft. For comparison, it is overlain by a graph of the seasonal variation and interannual increase of carbon dioxide observed at the Mauna Loa, Hawaii observatory. The AIRS data show the average concentration (parts per million) over an altitude range of 3 km to 13 km, whereas the Mauna Loa data show the concentration at an altitude of 3.4 km and its annual increase at a rate of approximately 2 parts per million (ppm) per year. The two most notable features of this visualization are the seasonal variation of CO2 and the trend of increase in its concentration from year to year. The global map clearly shows that the CO2 in the northern hemisphere peaks in April-May and then drops to a minimum in September-October. Although the seasonal cycle is less pronounced in the southern hemisphere it is opposite to that in the northern hemisphere. This seasonal cycle is governed by the growth cycle of plants. The northern hemisphere has the majority of the land masses, and so the amplitude of the cycle is greater in that hemisphere. The overall color of the map shifts toward the red with advancing time due to the annual increase of CO2. Although the mid-latitude jet streams are not visible in the map, we can see their influence upon the distribution of CO2 around the globe. These rivers of air occur at an altitude of about 5 km and rapidly transport CO2 around the globe at that altitude. In the northern hemisphere, the mid-latitude jet stream squirms like a released garden hose over the period of a few days due to the continental landmasses. In the southern hemisphere the jet stream flow is more directly West to East, and during the period from July to October the CO2 concentration is enhanced in a belt delineated by the jet stream and lofting of CO2 into the free troposphere by the high Andes is visible in this period. The zonal flow of CO2 around the globe at the latitude of South Africa, southern Australia and southern South America is readily apparent. Eastward flow of CO2 from Indonesia and the Celebes sea can be seen in the November to February time frame. || ", "hits": 58 }, { "id": 3686, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3686/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-15T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "LRO/LOLA Lunar South Pole Flyover", "description": "The Lunar Reconnaissance Oribiter (LRO) was launched on June 18, 2009. Its mission is to map the moon's surface, find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. One of the instruments on board is the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) which measures landing site slopes, lunar surface roughness, and has begun generation of a high resolution 3D map of the Moon.This visualization uses Clementine data for the global view of the moon, but then transitions to using only LRO/LOLA DEM with a neutral gray texture when flying around the lunar south pole. The DEM by itself creates an amazingly realistic view of the lunar southpole. As better maps are created from the other instruments aboard LRO, an even clearer picture of the moon will emerge.Please note that this visualization is match-frame rendered to The Moon's South Pole in 3D via LRO/LOLA First Light Data (#3633). || ", "hits": 308 }, { "id": 3684, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3684/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-03-03T00:00:00-05:00", "title": "Five-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies from 1881 to 2009 for Science On a Sphere", "description": "Each year, scientists at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology. The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. This color-coded map displays a long term progression of changing global surface temperatures, from 1881 to 2009. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and dark blue indicates the greatest cooling. For more information on the data used to generate these images, please see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp. || ", "hits": 91 }, { "id": 3661, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3661/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-02-18T12:00:00-05:00", "title": "Volume Renderings of Hurricane Isabel based on the WRF Computational Model (Three Resolutions)", "description": "This visualization shows cloud and ice data from an atmospheric simulation using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model. Clouds are shown as levels of white; and, ice is shown as levels of blue. Cloud and ice data from the model are volumetric (i.e. in multiple pressure levels).Three different reolution runs are shown as the camera moves in towards the East coast:1. 36 km per grid cell every hour covering most of the northern hemisphere (volume size: 415x270x27)2. 12 km per grid cell every hour covering central North America (volume size: 438x300x27)3. 4 km per grid cell every 5 minutes covering the US East coast (volume size: 300x300x27)This visualization was created in support of a video about the Climate in a Box project. for the Fall 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference. || ", "hits": 22 }, { "id": 3669, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3669/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-02-16T02:00:00-05:00", "title": "Norwegian-U.S. Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica", "description": "A massive, largely unexplored region, the East Antarctic ice sheet looms large in the global climate system, yet relatively little is known about its climate variability or the contribution it makes to sea level changes. The field expedition for this international partnership involves scientific investigations along two overland traverses in East Antarctica: one going from the Norwegian Troll Station to the United States South Pole Station in 2007-2008; and a return traverse by a different route in 2008-2009. This project will investigate climate change in East Antarctica.One of the most pressing environmental issues of our time is the need to understand the mechanisms of current global climate change and the associated impacts on global economic and political systems. In order to predict the future with confidence, we need a clear understanding of past and present changes in the Polar Regions and the role these changes play in the global climate system.For more information about this project go to http://traverse.npolar.no || ", "hits": 48 }, { "id": 3674, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3674/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-01-27T13:00:00-05:00", "title": "Five-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies from 1881 to 2009", "description": "Each year, scientists at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies analyze global temperature data. The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology. The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. This color-coded map displays a long term progression of changing global surface temperatures, from 1881 to 2009. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and dark blue indicates the greatest cooling. For more information on the data used to generate these images, please see http://giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/ || ", "hits": 29 }, { "id": 3675, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/3675/", "result_type": "Visualization", "release_date": "2010-01-26T14:00:00-05:00", "title": "Ten-Year Average Global Temperature Anomaly Image from 2000 to 2009", "description": "There is a high degree of interannual (year-to-year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long-term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long-term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. This image represents the 10 year average temperatures anomaly data from 2000 through 2009. || ", "hits": 44 } ] }