Wildfires Continue to Rage in California

This Landsat 8 image displays wildfire continuing to set the Sierra Nevada ablaze at 10:45 AM PST on November 8th, which claimed 6,713 total structures in Paradise, California. The image was produced with a 4-3-2 Landsat image, a combination of visible (red and green) and near-infrared light, to bring out active areas of the fire. Called the Camp Fire, this fire began at 6:30 AM and had destroyed over 100,000 acres of land in the next two days. The image does an admirable job showing the direction of the fire, with the cusp of it very clearly seen on the top-right of the image, and the wind can be seen blowing smoke and ash to the bottom-left. Since the image was taken in the earlier part of the fire's wrath, its long-term damage to the area is still obscured by smoke, and much of the damage had not even happened yet. Nonetheless, the vivid contrast between the bright red and orange flames and surrounding green forestry is quite stunning.

Debris Off of the Coast

This satellite image taken by the Landsat 8  satellite shows debris runoff into the Atlantic Ocean off of the coast of North Carolina after Hurricane Florence. When looking at the bodies of water in the image inland they all look to be bordered closely by uniformly pattered developed areas. This is indicative of heavy flooding in the area that washed large quantities of debris into these rivers after the hurricane. Looking at the ocean water near the shore there is a much darker discoloration compared to more open-water areas, with the darkest water occurring where the flooded rivers enter the Atlantic Ocean. The gradient of coloration shows the diffusion of debris that washed into rivers into the Atlantic Ocean which looks to take up most of the image. This satellite image is particularly jarring as the large scope of the debris washing into the ocean after the hurricane is visible.

https://komonews.com/weather/scotts-weather-blog/satellite-imagery-shows-pollution-runoff-in-carolina-rivers-from-hurricane-florence

Metaphor for Reality

This image was taken from the ISS by an astronaut. It shows a coffin shaped ice-berg named BT-15 migrating to the "Ice-Berg Graveyard". This graveyard has been named since as ice flows into this region of the ocean, ocean currents rapidly warm the water and ice begins to melt, "killing" ice-burgs. The fact that it is a coffin adds to the "morbid reality" and also a metaphor for our volatile climate change. 

Image of the Day, November 13th

This image is showing a dust storm in Greenland captured by the Sentinel-2 satellite. The region being photographed is located about 80 miles northwest of the village Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland. It’s astonishing that there is a dust storm as the region in the image is at 73 degrees North, or 700 miles north of the arctic circle. The dust is coming from the bedrock which is scrapped down by moving glaciers then being picked up by high winds. The dust storm came about due to the drying of a braided river and an aggressive northwestern wind. According to the NASA scientist who publicized this event, this is the largest dust storm seen this far north in his memory.

Link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2018/10/17/satellite-images-show-greenland-dust-storm/#.W-cQunpKjBJ

Meandering Goosenecks in Utah

This image is depicting a Southeastern region in Utah, where a meandering stream makes very sharp and curved bends around the surrounding valleys known as goosenecks. It is for that reason that this region is a part of the Goosenecks State Park in Utah. These are most often formed by a stream or river that moves from opposite sides across its floodplain, which then erodes the sediments, forming a cut bank. This then deposits other sediment downstream onto a point bar and forms the meandering stream shown above. This image may be important as it helps show what happens to rivers when they are faced with a slow flow and are forced to alternate between high and low elevation points in a tilted flood plain valley such as the one in Utah.

Carbon Dioxide Frost on Mars

The image of the day for November 8th is a satellite image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Through the HiRISE sensor, the MRO is able to capture visible light with a resolution of 1m. The image captures a rust colored crater covered with CO2 frost from the Martian atmosphere. During the spring, frost only remains on the slopes of the craters that are facing south. As the frost melts the rising gas brings dark colored sand from lower levels of the soil, leaving a banded appearance at the surface.

World's largest offshore wind farm

At first glance, it appears to just be a pretty aerial photograph of a water body, but if you look closer, you can see small white dots in an orderly pattern. The image was captured on April 28, 2013 by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite. The image depicts the world’s largest offshore wind farm off the coast of England. In total, the London wind farm array consists of 175 wind turbines each 147 meters tall and spans a distance of 100 square kilometers. It is apparent that the white objects have height due to the shadows visible in the image. The swirling of brown and blue in the image is spring sediment runoff from the Thames River mixing with the North Sea. Some people have become concerned with the impact the wind turbines are having on sediment in the ocean and how the changing sediment transport could alter the underwater ecosystem. If you look closely, in some places the sediment wake pattern is correlated with the wind turbine locations.  

Image of the day 01/11/18

This is an image of Lake Bogoria in Kenya that was taken using a drone by a Spanish photographer named Cristobal Serrano. In the image, a large group of flamingos feeding in the lake. In addition, the unique combination of a volcanic layer of soil under the topsoil and the dry season has resulted in high concentrations of salts and minerals that created the variety of colors that can be seen in the image.  Visually, the shapes and patterns of the image seem natural but the colors combination is not something we are used to see in a natural environment and that what makes this image special.

 

https://www.gdtfoto.de/seiten/mhp32AK67bn2018EN.html

Wildfires Destroy Neighborhood in Santa Rosa (10/31/18)

This satellite image shows the damage caused by wildfires (from Oct 2017) in the Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa, CA. The destroyed homes appear as a continuous, homogenous, group of building remains that take up about half of the spatial extent of the photo. The burned homes have a much lighter tone than the dark roofs on the standing homes. There are homes that evaded the fire surrounding all sides but the north section of the burned homes suggesting that the fire came in from the north. According to an analysis of the satellite images from Santa Rosa by The New York Times, about 1,800 buildings were destroyed by the wildfires which was three times higher than the estimate officials had made earlier. This photo shows about 1,300 of those destroyed buildings in the Coffey Park neighborhood alone. This image and its analysis were important in visualizing and providing a more accurate estimation of the extent of the damage caused by the wildfires, something that was not accomplished as well without the aid of satellite imagery
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/12/us/santa-rosa-california-fires-damage.html