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Amazon Forest Fires Rage in Roraima - NASA (Mar 2) |
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Mar 2 · February 22, 2024JPEG
Roraima—Brazil’s northernmost state—has a wet climate, which helps rainforests thrive and suppresses the natural occurrence of forest fires, even during the dry season. Nonetheless, remote sensing scientists have observed fires in this northern Amazon region for as long as satellite observations have been available, especially during the drier months of October through March. Most are management fires, ignited for purposes such as burning pastures and agricultural areas or clearing rainforest.
In the second half of February 2024, NASA satellites observed unusually widespread and intense fire activity in Roraima, according to ... Read more ...
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Methane | Vital Signs – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet - NASA (May 25, 2023) |
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May 25, 2023 · Methane is a powerful heat-trapping gas. The amount of methane in the atmosphere is increasing due to human activities.
Methane (CH4) is a powerful greenhouse gas, and is the second-largest contributor to climate warming after carbon dioxide (CO2). A molecule of methane traps more heat than a molecule of CO2, but methane has a relatively short lifespan of 7 to 12 years in the atmosphere, while CO2can persistfor hundreds of years or more.
Methane comes from both natural sources and human activities. An estimated 60% of today’s methane emissions are the result of human activities. The largest sources of methane are agriculture, fossil fuels, and decomposition of ... Read more ...
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In hot water: here's why ocean temperatures are the hottest on record - NASA (Apr 20, 2023) |
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Apr 20, 2023 · Ninety percent of global warming is occurring in the ocean, causing the water’s internal heat to increase since modern recordkeeping began in 1955, as shown in the upper chart. (The shaded blue region indicates the 95% margin of uncertainty.) This chart shows annual estimates for the first 2,000 meters of ocean depth.
Each data point in the upper chart represents a five-year average. For example, the 2020 value represents the average change in ocean heat content (since 1955) for the years 2018 up to and including 2022.
The lower chart tracks monthly changes in ocean heat content for the entire water column (from the top to the bottom of the ocean) from 1992 to ... Read more ...
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How El Niño May Test the Limits of Our Climate Knowledge - NASA (Dec 08, 2022) |
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Dec 08, 2022 · November 29, 2022JPEG
In December 2022, Earth was in the grips of La Niña—an oceanic phenomenon characterized by the presence of cooler than normal sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. The current La Niña, relatively weak but unusually prolonged, began in 2020 and has returned for its third consecutive northern hemisphere winter, making this a rare “triple-dip” event. Other triple-dip La Niña’s recorded since 1950 spanned the years 1998-2001, 1973-1976, and 1954-1956.
The map above shows sea surface temperature anomalies on November 29, 2022. The signature of La Niña is visible in the ... Read more ...
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Tracking 30 Years of Sea Level Rise - NASA (Aug 11, 2022) |
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Aug 11, 2022 · Thirty years ago, scientists and engineers launched a new satellite to study the rising and falling of seas over time, a task that once could only be done from the coast. TOPEX/Poseidon rocketed into space on August 10, 1992, and started a 30-year record of ocean surface height around the world. The observations have confirmed on a global scale what scientists previously saw from the shoreline: the seas are rising, and the pace is quickening.
Scientists have found that global mean sea level—shown in the line plot above and below—has risen 10.1 centimeters (3.98 inches) since 1992. Over the past 140 years, satellites and tide gauges together show that global sea ... Read more ...
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Flash floods bury cars and strand tourists in Death Valley - NASA (Aug 07, 2022) |
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Aug 07, 2022 · In early August 2022, flash floods soaked Furnace Creek in Death Valley, the driest place in North America. In just three hours on August 5, a thousand-year rainfall event dropped 75 percent of the local average annual rainfall, which is just under 2 inches (5 centimeters). Flood water washed debris over roads, swept away and buried cars, knocked a water facility offline, damaged buildings, and stranded about a thousand visitors and staff in Death Valley National Park.
The deluge dropped 1.46 inches (3.7 centimeters), which came close to breaking the single-day record for highest rainfall ever received in the park, which was 1.47 inches in April 1988. It did, however, break ... Read more ...
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A hotter planet will expose divides in the world of work - NASA (Aug 02, 2022) |
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Aug 02, 2022 · NASA is a world leader in climate studies and Earth science. While its role is not to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change, its purview does include providing the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change. NASA then makes this information available to the global community – the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the world.
Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many dimensions – science, economics, society, politics, and moral and ethical questions – and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be ... Read more ...
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Study Confirms Climate Models are Getting Future Warming Projections Right – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet - NASA (May 03, 2022) |
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May 03, 2022 · There’s an old saying that “the proof is in the pudding,” meaning that you can only truly gauge the quality of something once it’s been put to a test. Such is the case with climate models: mathematical computer simulations of the various factors that interact to affect Earth’s climate, such as our atmosphere, ocean, ice, land surface and the Sun.
For decades, people have legitimately wondered how well climate models perform in predicting future climate conditions. Based on solid physics and the best understanding of the Earth system available, they skillfully reproduce observed data. Nevertheless, they have a wide response to increasing carbon ... | By Alan Buis, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Read more ...
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Satellites Size Up Bubbles of Methane in Lake Ice - NASA (Jul 14, 2020) |
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Jul 14, 2020 · Some features of this site are not compatible with your browser. Install Opera Mini to better experience this site.
According to one estimate, there are more than 3.6 million lakes in the Arctic. They are remote and hard to reach and sample in the field, especially when they are covered with ice during the Arctic’s long winters.
Yet they are critically important to understanding climate change. As tiny organisms in Arctic lake sediments called archaea break down organic matter, they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane (CH4) has a heat-trapping power about 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
Finding the sources of methane around the world and ... Read more ...
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Permafrost Becoming a Carbon Source Instead of a Sink - NASA (Nov 19, 2019) |
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Nov 19, 2019 · Winter carbon emissions from Arctic regions appear to be adding more carbon to Earth’s atmosphere each year than is being taken up by Arctic plants and trees. It is a stark reversal for a region that has captured and stored carbon for tens of thousands of years.
In a study published in >Nature Climate Change, scientists estimated that 1.7 billion metric tons of carbon were lost from Arctic permafrost regions during each winter from 2003 to 2017. Over the same span, an average of 1 billion metric tons of carbon were taken up by vegetation during summer growing seasons. This changes the region from being a net “sink” of carbon dioxide—where it is captured ... Read more ...
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A Surprising Surge at Vavilov Ice Cap - NASA (May 12, 2019) |
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May 12, 2019 · Some features of this site are not compatible with your browser. Install Opera Mini to better experience this site.
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June 24, 2018JPEG Read more ...
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Earth's Energy Imbalance - NASA (Nov 03, 2017) |
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Nov 03, 2017 · By James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Karina von Schuckmann -- January 2012
Deployment of an international array of Argo floats, measuring ocean heat content to a depth of 2000 m, was completed during the past decade, allowing the best assessment so far of Earth's energy imbalance. The observed planetary energy gain during the recent strong solar minimum reveals that the solar forcing of climate, although significant, is overwhelmed by a much larger net human-made climate forcing. The measured imbalance confirms that, if other climate forcings are fixed, atmospheric CO Figure 1. Contributions to Earth's (positive) energy imbalance in 2005-2010. Estimates for the ... Read more ...
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NASA pinpoints cause of Earth's recent record carbon dioxide spike - NASA (Nov 03, 2017) |
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Nov 03, 2017 · A new NASA study provides space-based evidence that Earth's tropical regions were the cause of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years.
Scientists suspected the 2015-16 El Nino - one of the largest on record - was responsible, but exactly how has been a subject of ongoing research. Analyzing the first 28 months of data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite, researchers conclude impacts of El Nino-related heat and drought occurring in tropical regions of South America, Africa and Indonesia were responsible for the record spike in global carbon dioxide. The findings are published in ... Read more ...
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From Russia with Questions - NASA (Sep 15, 2016) |
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Sep 15, 2016 · Today’s image is the answer to our February 2021 puzzler.
Earth science satellites are generally used to observe certain features of the planet—landforms, atmospheric chemistry, ocean patterns. But at the same time, they periodically show us things that few people have seen or even looked for.
In February 2020, our team noticed a twitter message with a peculiar and beautiful image from Russia near 66 degrees north latitude. It turned into a scientific detective story and an unresolved case.
In the images above and below, acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8, stripe patterns twist and turn around the hills of the northern Central ... Read more ...
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