Satellite eye on Earth: may 2014 in pictures

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Credits: JAXA/ESA A giant, geological wonder in the Sahara desert of Mauritania, the 40km-diameter circular Richat structure is a geological feature that is easier to observe from space than on the ground. Once thought to be the result of a meteor impact, researchers now believe it was caused by a large dome of molten rock uplifting and, once at the surface, being shaped by wind and water into what we see today. Concentric bands of resistant quartzite rocks form ridges, with valleys of less-resistant rock between them. The dark area on the left is part of the Adrar plateau of sedimentary rock, while large area covered by sand dunes can be seen in the lower-right part of the image, and sand is encroaching into the structure's southern side.
Credits: OLI/Landsat-8/NASA Rounded mountains are a common theme in Chinese art. Mountains were considered sacred in Chinese culture, and mountain caves and grottoes were seen as gateways to another realm of harmony. Such beliefs were no doubt influenced by the karst geology that covers some 13% of eastern and south-eastern Asia. The mountains found in Guangxi province are perhaps the best example of a mature karst landscape called cone karst. Such a landscape was able to form because a deep layer of limestone and dolomite bedrock covers broad sections of south-eastern China. At the same time, the region receives abundant rain, which dissolves the bedrock easily.
Springtime in the Gulf of Alaska Credits: MODIS/Aqua/NASA A view of the Gulf of Alaska when a substantial bloom of phytoplankton colored the waters south of Prince William Sound with green, chlorophyll-rich life. Closer to the coast, the water has a tan tint, a sign of sediment in the water - likely runoff from snowmelt-swollen rivers dumping their excess into the sea. Springtime brings increased sunlight, bursts of nutrients, and changing water conditions to the Gulf of Alaska. The combination promotes massive blooms of phytoplankton – microscopic, plant-like organisms that turn sunlight into food and then become fodder for some of the richest fisheries on the planet.
Eastern Aleutian Islands on May 15, 2014. Credits: MODIS/NASA Remote, rugged and extraordinarily beautiful, Alaska’s Aleutian Islands are best known for wildlife reserves, military bases, fishing, furs and fog. The archipelago sweeps about 1,200 miles (1,800 km) from the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula to Attu, the most westward island. Four major island groups hold 14 large islands, about 55 smaller islands, and a large number of islets, adding up to roughly 150 islands/islets in total. This chain separates the Bering Sea (north) from the Pacific Ocean (south).
Credits: OLI/Lansat-8/NASA Shishaldin and Turqouise Lake (within Fisher caldera) are two restive volcanic features on Unimak Island, Alaska. Shishaldin is currently listed at a code orange alert level by the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which means the volcano is "exhibiting heightened or escalating unrest with increased potential of eruption, timeframe uncertain, or eruption is underway with no or minor volcanic-ash emissions.” The dark spot at the volcano’s summit is fresh ash. Shifting hydrothermal plumes rising from the bottom of the Turquoise Lake stir up sediment, causing the light blue-green colour.
satellite images taken from 01 to 10 May 2014." class="gu-image responsive-img" itemprop="contentURL" src="/c3bfa3f0-a254-434a-b8af-e7c635dc7526-620x494.jpeg" width="620" /> Credits: Probe-V/VITO/ESA An image of Europe which is a composite of Proba-V satellite images taken in early May 2014. Launched just over a year ago, the washing machine-sized satellite carries the Vegetation imager that maps land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days. The data can be used for day-by-day tracking of extreme weather, alerting authorities to crop failures, monitoring inland water resources and tracing the steady spread of deserts and deforestation.
2014. Credits: Probe-V/VITO/ESA The triangular Sinai Peninsula, acquired by Proba-V.

13 May 2014 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/lake_powell.php http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83716 satelliteeye Credits: NASA In March 1999 (left), water levels in Lake Powell were relatively high, and the water was a clear, dark blue. By May 2014, (right) the lake – created by Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River – was at 42% of its capacity. Slightly above average mountain snowfall is expected to raise water levels to about 51% of capacity by October 2014.

Credits: KARI/ESA This satellite image shows the Zaatari refugee camp, 13km east of the city of Mafraq in northern Jordan. Located just over 10km from the border with Syria, the camp is currently home to more than 100,000 people displaced by the conflict in the neighbouring country.
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Credits: ISS/NASA The southern half of Lake Baikal in eastern Russia, the deepest lake in the world and by volume holding the largest amount of freshwater. Most of the lake is covered with dull grey ice. The brightest point in the image is the reflection of the sun’s rays off a small zone of open water where the ice has begun to melt. Sunlight also reflects off the water surface of the straight Angara River, the main outlet of the lake. Large smoke palls from wildfires appear on the top and upper right of the image and smaller, individual smoke plumes arc away from the north shore of the lake (image top left).
Photograph: ISS/NASA The Western Sahara desert where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. The city of Tarfaya, Morocco, is visible, while streaks in the sand were created by northerly winds.
Photograph: ALI/EO-1/NASA Though it looks like it could be a thin slice of mineral-speckled rock viewed through a microscope, this image was actually acquired by a satellite orbiting 705km (438 miles) above Earth’s surface when the sensor was pointed at a small set of islands in Foxe Basin, the shallow northern reaches of Hudson Bay. Canada’s Manning Islands are seen in the lower left of the image, and dark colours in the image are open water. Snow-free ice appears grey, while snow-covered ice appears white.
Credits: ALI/EO-1/NASA Early on 27 April, a powerful tornado cut a swath of destruction through the small towns of Mayflower and Vilonia, Arkansas. Sixteen people were killed and 400-500 homes were destroyed. The tornado left a 41-mile (66km) trail of destruction and was classified with an EF4 rating, meaning it had winds between 267-322kph (166-200mph). In this image, a trail of damaged trees and homes can be seen near Interstate 40. The storm moved in a north-easterly direction, hitting the southern part of Mayflower first, then crossing I-40, and flattening neighbourhoods along the shore of Lake Conway.
Photograph: ISS/NASA A narrow barrier island protects the lagoon of Venice from storm waves in the northern Adriatic Sea, and breakwaters protect inlets to the lagoon. Red tiles of the roofs on the island of Venice contrast with the greys of the mainland sister city of Mestre. The cities are joined by a prominent causeway. Another causeway joins the island to the airport (top right). Small bright agricultural fields of well-drained soils (top left) contrast with the darker vegetation of back bay swamps.
Mississippi Alluvial Plain aqua The expansive Mississippi alluvial plain spreads from the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers in southern Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. With warmer weather greening the forests throughout the region, the tan farmland within the alluvial plain stands out. Only a few large patches of forest remain. In the northern Arkansas, hardwood forests still dominate the landscape on Crowley’s Ridge. In southern Arkansas, bottomland forests grow in wildlife preserves along the White River. And in Louisiana, bald cypress forests thrive in the swampy wetlands of the Atchafalaya basin.
Photograph: ISS/NASA The Mississippi River as it meanders through the city of New Orleans with sunglint on Lake Pontchartrain at the lower right of the image.
Dust storm over the Caspian Sea Credits: MODIS A broad band of brown dust rises from the west of the Volga River and blows over the Kalmykia and Asktrakhan region of Russia. A longer plume, probably arising from Turkmenistan, blows south-east across the blue waters of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest salt lake. The water appears green in its shallow northern part, where it has an average depth of just 5-6m (16-20 feet). The southern part of the Caspian Sea is much deeper and appears dark blue.
Credits: JAXA/ESA The snow-capped mountains running through the centre of this satellite image are part of the Cordillera Blanca or "white range" in South America's Andes. There are hundreds of glaciers in this range, providing a major source of water for irrigation and hydroelectric power. Located near the centre of this image, Mount Huascarán is the highest peak in Peru at 6,768 m.
Credits: NASA The Nagarunja Sagar dam on India's Krishna River was built between 1955 and 1972. Erected by the hand labour of 125,000 workers, it is the largest masonry dam in operation in the world. Standing at 120m high, and 800m long, it is made up of huge rocks and mortar.

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New Satellite Boosts Research On Global Rainfall and Climate

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AppId is over the quota
by nicola jones
Climate scientists trying to figure out how fast the world is warming have a hard task on their hands. But, says meteorologist Brian Soden at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School for Marine and Atmospheric Science, rainfall presents an even tougher nut to crack. "You can be driving down the highway and at one stoplight you’re in sunshine and at the next U.S. and Japanese space agencies released the satellite's first images last month.you’re at a downpour," he sighs. "Temperature isn’t like that."
The vast variability in precipitation over space and time has made it one of the most difficult climate variables to measure. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that a warmer world should overall be a rainier one, with wet areas destined to get wetter and dry areas drier. But the certainty in rainfall predictions is frustratingly low. Researchers still don’t know what sorts of clouds lead to what sorts of rain; when and where and how much water evaporates into clouds, thereby moving energy around the globe; or if rainfall really will increase as theory predicts.
Some of that is now set to change thanks to the launch of the joint Japanese-NASA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) observatory in February. The satellite is the first designed to detect harder-to-spot precipitation, including drizzle and snow, and greatly expands the

Launched in February, the GPM observatory marks a huge step for rainfall measurement.

well-watched part of the planet from the tropics north to Iceland and south to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. GPM marks a huge step for rainfall measurement, says Robert Adler, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland and one of NASA’s Precipitation Measurement Missions principal investigators. The resulting data will be made available to disaster relief agencies within 1-3 hours, which should help to get help to areas hit by flash floods. The information will be plugged into basic science questions like what sorts of aerosols make for rainier clouds. And it will extend the currently-short satellite record, says Soden, giving modelers the data they need to validate their predictions. "Modelers better be excited about this," says Gail Skofronick-Jackson, deputy project scientist for GPM at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "I’m going to be mad if they’re not."
Measuring rainfall is one of those things that seems deceptively simple. "It sounds really easy, like just putting a bucket out," says Adler. "It is more complicated than that. Globally, it’s been a struggle for a long time to understand how precipitation is distributed."
The gold standard for rainfall measurements are rain gauges, which simply look at the height or weight of water collected in a container. Today there are about 6,000 of these around the world, contributing data to international databases like the Global Precipitation Climatology Project, with some national compilations dating back to the 1860s or earlier. But these records still present problems. Like temperature sensors that are sometimes installed accidentally in the cool shade or near hot slabs of concrete, rain sensors are sometimes placed comically too close to trees that grow and eventually shelter the buckets. Windy days can blow water The GPM observatory greatly expands the areas of Earth where rainfall is monitored.out of the gauges. And, most importantly, the spatial coverage is extremely limited.
There are no rain gauges at sea, for example. And the developing world often has few stations or isn’t inclined to share its data for geopolitical reasons. For instance, where conflicts rage about access to river water passing from one nation to another — as from to India to Pakistan, for example — there may be reasons to keep information about alternative access to freshwater resources from rain under wraps. With gauges alone, says Adler, "we didn’t have good information" for more than 75-80 percent of the planet.
Even the small distance between stations in a densely-monitored region can be problematic. Skofronick-Jackson remembers one field expedition where the researchers just missed a major storm. "In one event we had something like 20 inches of snow," she says, "and all our guys on the ground were sitting there waiting at 2 a.m. for the snow to come through, and they only got a couple of centimeters. They were so sad. Then their car nearly got stuck in the snow getting back to the hotel."
Other tools can help to make up the difference. For example, ground-based radar stations sweep out a horizontal signal that bounces off raindrops to fill in some spatial gaps. But the biggest improvement has come from satellites, which have been collecting data since the 1980s — in particular the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM, pronounced ‘trim’), launched in 1997 by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and NASA, which

Theory says that a warmer world should hold more water in its air.

together also launched the GPM satellite this year. "TRMM was designed to measure tropical rain, which is where most of the interesting science questions were at the time," says Skofronick-Jackson. "Most of that region is ocean, and that’s where the heat comes for convective storms." Researchers keen to know how the heat of the sun, held in by a blanket of carbon dixoide, was pumping energy into earth’s system, needed to know how much water was evaporating at the equator. "You can’t measure the energy movement, but you can measure the water," says Skofronick-Jackson. "That’s climate change right there."
But TRMM — surprisingly still running strong after 17 years of operation — is in an orbit that can only see from 35 degrees north to south, from the Mediterranean Sea to the southern tip of South Africa. And its frequency bands are designed to catch tropical moderate-to-heavy rain, down to about 0.5 millimeters per hour. "It doesn’t account for drizzle, and it doesn’t account for snow," says Skofronick-Jackson.
Thanks to these challenges and the relatively short period of good satellite coverage, climate researchers still have a hard time saying what’s going on with our planet’s precipitation. Theory says that a warmer world should hold more water in its air: about 7 percent more for every degree of warming. That bump in humidity should mean about 1-2 percent more rain per degree of warming, says Adler, but that number is far less certain. And the additional rain should be focused in the areas that are already wet: but that’s a general conclusion that only "holds when you close your eyes and squint" at the map, says Soden — at the local scale it doesn’t necessarily hold water.
In terms of the most basic numbers, TRMM scientists thought they had pinned down the total amount of rainfall falling on our planet each year to within about 5 percent, says Christian Kummerow of Colorado State University, a former project scientist for TRMM. But then more recent

GPM should provide modelers data needed for tuning their climate models to include clouds.

calculations of solar radiation deriving from NASA’s 2006 CloudSat view of cloud cover hinted that those rain estimates might be 10 percent too low. "Whenever I get asked about this I say just wait six months," says Kummerow. GPM should be able to answer this, he says, by expanding the monitored region to 65 degrees N and S. "The poles are a desert, but high latitudes like Seattle and Vancouver — they get a lot of rain," he says — perhaps more than estimated from TRMM data. The more interesting question is whether rainfall is really increasing as the planet warms. The IPCC’s 2013 report looked at four different datasets. None could say, within error, whether rainfall had increased or decreased since the 1950s. "We haven’t seen any strong indication of an increase in precipitation," says Adler. "The models say we should, but we don’t see it yet." In particular, TRMM’s two different rain-measuring instruments gave conflicting results during periods of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), when the world gets slightly warmer: One saw more rain, and the other didn’t. Again, says Kummerow, GPM should be able to sort out which instrument was right.
The only thing the IPCC could say with high confidence is that precipitation over land in the Northern Hemisphere has gone up, with heavy rainfall events getting heavier. Xuebin Zhang of Environment Canada and colleagues recently found that the amount of rain falling in a single deluge day has gone up in the Northern Hemisphere by 3.3 percent
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Although the latest U.N. climate report significantly increases its projections for sea level rise this century, some scientists warn even those estimates are too conservative. But, Nicola Jones reports, one thing is certain: Predicting sea level rise far into the future is a very tricky task.
READ MOREfrom 1951-2005. Climate models haven’t got a good grip on this yet. Soden’s 2008 study, which forged the first link between warmer weather and more powerful rainstorms, found that extreme rainfall events were under-predicted by models. GPM should help through better monitoring of rain droplet size and a 3D view of clouds, with data for every 500 meters of elevation. That will give modelers badly needed data for tuning their climate models to include clouds, says Kummerow, which in turn should help resolve things like predictions of deluges. Overall, says Adler, GPM will be an even bigger step up for rain watchers than was TRMM.
The GPM is now being put through its paces; cleaned up datasets will be available for use by June at the latest, the team says. Still, it will be a while before the new data yield fruit: The decades needed to put observations in context makes data gathering a "slow and tedious process," says Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium in Victoria, British Columbia.
"In terms of constraining climate models, what we really need is a long record," says Soden. "GPM is really trying to do that."
POSTED ON 03 Apr 2014 IN Climate Policy & Politics Pollution & Health Science & Technology Urbanization Water North America
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicola Jones is a freelance journalist based in Pemberton, British Columbia, just outside of Vancouver. With a background in chemistry and oceanography, she writes about the physical sciences, most often for the journal Nature




. She has also contributed to Scientific American, Globe and Mail, and New Scientist and serves as the science journalist in residence at the University of British Columbia. Previously for Yale Environment 360, she wrote about how rare metal shortages might affect green technologies and the debate on solar geoengineering.


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