South Platte River, 29 June 2103 South Platte River, 17 September 2013 By Holli Riebeek20 September 2013 (NASA) – Though water levels on the South Platte River were receding, muddy brown waters were still out of the river’s banks near Greeley, Colorado, on 17 September 2013, when the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the […]
By Holli Riebeek10 September 2013 (NASA) – The extreme floods that have been threatening northeastern China and the Russian Far East are slowly moving north along the length of the Amur River. The bulge of flood water has now reached Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a Russian city of about 500,000 people. The flood overwhelmed a dam, and the […]
(NASA) – Elephant Butte Reservoir dwindled to its lowest level in 41 years during the summer of 2013, despite monsoon rains in early July. It had been filled nearly to capacity for most of 1985 to 2000; the left-hand image from 1994 shows it about 89 percent full. At right, it has been reduced to […]
By Rhett A. Butler4 September 2013 (mongabay.com) – Data released this week by Terra-i, a collaborative mapping initiative, shows that deforestation in Ecuador for the first three months of 2013 was pacing more than 300 percent ahead of last year’s rate. The report comes shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa killed off a proposed plan […]
By Holli Riebeek2 September 2013 (NASA) – Smoke from the Rim Fire choked Yosemite National Park during the busy Labor Day Weekend. Air quality reached unhealthy levels from Yosemite to the San Joaquin Valley, warned the National Weather Service in an air quality alert. Since fine particles in smoke can irritate the eyes and respiratory […]
29 August 2013 (mongabay.com) – Nearly 500 fires are burning across the Indonesian island of Sumatra, raising fears that choking air pollution could return to Singapore and Malaysia. The fires, set to clear land for agriculture, are concentrated in Riau, Jambi, and South Sumatra provinces. Like the fires that charred the region two months ago, […]
By William L. Stefanov, Jacobs2 September 2013 (NASA) – This photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station highlights a late summer plankton bloom across much of Lake Ontario, one of North America’s Great Lakes. Microscopic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can reach such large concentrations and color the water to such an extent […]
By Adam Voiland27 August 2013 (NASA) – On 26 August 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of the Rim fire burning in and near Yosemite National Park. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fire. Rim Fire, California Technorati Tags: […]
By Holli Riebeek26 August 2013 (NASA) – The winter of 2013 was among the driest on record for California, setting the stage for an active fire season. By August 26, the Rim Fire had made its way into the record books. At just 15 percent contained, the fire is now the 13th largest in California […]
9 August 2013 (NASA) – This animation shows the projected increase in potential evaporation through the year 2100, relative to 1980, based on the combined results of multiple climate models. The maximum increase across North America is about 1 mm/day by 2100. This concept, potential evaporation, is a measure of drying potential or “fire weather.” […]
