19 September 2012 (NSIDC) – On 16 September 2012, sea ice extent dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). This appears to have been the lowest extent of the year. In response to the setting sun and falling temperatures, ice extent will now climb through autumn and winter. However, a shift in […]
Caption by Adam Voiland19 September 2012 Wildfires have burned throughout the western United States for months. Major blazes first emerged in New Mexico in May, then began to turn up in Colorado and Idaho in large numbers. Most recently, fires have surged in California and Washington. […] The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com20 August 2012 Latin America lost nearly 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) of forest — an area larger than the state of Oregon — between 2001 and 2010, finds a new study [pdf] that is the first to assess both net forest loss and regrowth across the Caribbean, Central and […]
Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 1989 Glaciers on Puncak Jaya, 2009 Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Michael Prentice, Lonnie Thompson, and Andrew Klein 1 September 2012 Tropical and glacier don’t seem like words that belong in the same sentence. But mountain peaks near the equator in South America, Africa, and tropical Asia have […]
Caption by Adam Voiland30 August 2012 Early on 29 August 2012, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi-NPP satellite captured this nighttime view of Hurricane Isaac and the cities near the Gulf Coast of the United States. The image was acquired at 1:57 a.m. local time (6:57 Universal Time) by the VIIRS […]
Caption by Adam Voiland20 August 2012 For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires. Now researchers have another tool for observing fires around the world. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to low light […]
Caption by Michon Scott21 August 2012 After four other Typhoons—Saola, Damrey, Haikui, and Kai-tak—made landfall in eastern China in just three weeks, Typhoon Tembin appeared ready to do the same. Tembin formed as a tropical depression over the western Pacific Ocean on 19 August 2012, and strengthened to a typhoon the next day. The Moderate […]
Caption by Michon Scott19 August 2012 Intense wildfires in California and Idaho sent smoke eastward across the United States in mid-August 2012. Smoke affected air quality as far away as the Great Lakes Region, and some of the thickest smoke stretched from the Dakotas to Texas. Wildfire smoke is a combination of gases and aerosols—tiny […]
Caption by Mike Carlowicz17 August 2012 July 2012 was the hottest month on record for the contiguous (lower 48) United States, according to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It turns out that the month was pretty warm globally as well, lining up as the fourth warmest […]
By Maria-José Viñas, NASA Earth Science News Team 9 August 2012 An unusually strong storm formed off the coast of Alaska on August 5 and tracked into the center of the Arctic Ocean, where it slowly dissipated over the next several days. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color […]
