This image was acquired by the Rosetta Orbiter Imaging System OSIRIS from a distance of 350 000 km at 22:28 UTC 12th November. The resolution is 6.5 km/pixel.
The mission is named after the famous ‘Rosetta Stone‘ and refers to an important discovery helped to understand hieroglyphics.
Picture Credits: ESA ©2009 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
More Antarctica same day at ice-map.appspot.com.
The 2009 Arctic melting gained momentum, it is now below 2008 and accelerates. A massive bloom of algae has set up Alaska’s coast guard and Innuits. Nobody remembers that kind of occurrence in Chukchi Sea at any time.
Greenpeace expects the collapse of hundred square kilometers of the Petermann glacier soon. The Arctic Sunrise anchored closely enough to document from helicopters. Cams have been installed on the glacier.
Above image shows east Greenland close to the Jakobshavn glacier with all the melting ponds giving the ice sheet the structure of a sponge. Each pixel equals roughly a few hundred meters.
The good news is sea level will not rise if Arctic melts. Your soft drink full of ice cubes does not overflow for same reason. Instead of the Northwest and Northeast Passages will become navigable by regular ships for part of the year very soon and feeds economic and military interests.
International shipping routes between Asia and Europe will be reduced by thousands of miles. Canada could face worldwide demands on opening the Passage for international transit. The implications in terms of increased ship traffic, pollution and infrastructure development regarding Arctic’s fragile ecosystems are obviously.
Each year the Arctic undergoes the seasonal formation in winter and in summer an area of ice the size of Europe melts away to freeze again the following winter - usually.
20th September 2007 - the National Ice and Snow Data Center announced a historical arctic sea ice minimum: A loss of 4.61 million square kilometer. That means some square meters per terrestrial - compared against the 20 year average minimum. Your greenhouse gas emissions do count!
Due to the positive ice-albedo feedback effect Arctic sea ice is a sensitive tipping point in the Earth climate system. Without that ice, heat energy from the ocean would be transferred to warm the polar air. In fact, sea ice is so effective an insulator that its absence would warm the overlying air by between 20 and 40°C during winter.
Last year the September minimum did not break the latest record, on the other hand it was just a matter of a few days. What can we expect for 2009? An important factor is the thickness of the sea ice. Scientists distinguish between annual and multi-annual ice. The latter is thicker and less vulnerable to sun rays, warmer sea water or air.
Based on submarine measurements, the ice draft is reported to have thinned by 40% from the 1960s and 1970s to the 1990s. Latest satellite based analysis show Arctic is now literally on thin ice. Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises just 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down from 30 to 40 percent.
Personally, I think Climate Change is lacking a powerful symbol. CO2 is invisible, so what can we print on T-shirts? Although measurements and graphs state a yearly sea level rise of millimeters, a temperature increase of fractions of a degree and a few ppm of CO2 molecules - does someone feels the daily impact?
The vanishing Arctic may serve as a symbol, but climate models estimate the Arctic might be completely ice free in summer in 20 or 30 years. This would be an irreversible result of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions and a lack of political action and responsibility. Not all aspects of the Arctic are already modeled - possibly you can book a tourist trip to North Pole much earlier. Until then you may like the idea to see and prove how Global Warming is already changing our planet.
Two NASA satellites called Aqua and Terra capture daily photos of the poles on their orbit. The MODIS Rapid Response System at NASA/GSFC combines them into a daily mosaic of the Arctic since 18th April 2009. Since a few days the mosaic from the day before is available using the Explorer here with geoLink 1650.
More interactivity allows the spin-off side ice-map.appspot.com: seven daily updated maps, four zoom levels, a perma link feature and the calendar give you full access to the current melting season.
By default it starts with the latest complete mosaic of the Arctic. You can zoom in from a resolution of 4km to 500m meters per pixel (Ctrl-down/up) and see daily changes (Ctrl-left/right).
The tiles are downloaded and cropped on request, depending on the zoom level it may take some seconds or more until the picture is complete. But once all the tiles are processed and cached the interface is very responsive. The more users the better is the performance. Unfortunately the NASA near-realtime data feed experiences sometimes technical issues, a status page give latest information.
Very informative is the band 367 layer with a false color display. It includes an infra-red band and maps the wave lengths differently to the red, blue and green channels. Clouds, ice, water, land and vegetation are shown in different colors.
The photo on the right shows some dark red areas with melt water on the ice surface. In summer blue melt ponds will dot the surface of Greenland. If in late September there is no more red - all ice had disappeared.
For your convenience here are a few direct links:
Iceland (20/04/2009 - Band 367), Jakobshavn Glacier (24/04/2009 - Band 367), Bering Strait (06/05/2009), former Ellesmere Ice Shelf (02/05/2009), Nuuk (07/05/2009)
Did I mention Antarctica is also available? At least the outer regions are enjoying still a bit of sun light, but using the calendar you can go back and see an nearly intact Wilkins Ice Shelf (06/03/2009).
Follow Arctic sea ice changes on Twitter and discuss by using the comment function.
Many thanks to the whole MODIS Rapid Response team. Without their cooperation this project would not have been possible.
The Google Earth Plugin turns browsers into full Earth browsers. Well, not supported is UNIX, Apple, but FireFox and Internet Explorer running on Windows 2000 or better. The API of the plugin is well supported and this site will have a progressing amount of features available in 3D. First achievement is the Daily Planet map provided by NASA’s OneEarth server.
The current implentation is far from complete and a lot of further work is ahead. Especially registered users will find out that the plugin does not allow to use the flyout menu any longer and switching maps is a challenge. Please log out in this case or prepare the geoLinks you need in advance. As an another aspect the overlays do not work with Google Earth as base map. However seeing the Planet is no longer flat is exciting. Expect far more improvement in usability and data soon.
The navigation is quite simple: just try all mouse buttons, double click or drag the globe.
geoLink 1515 links exclusively to the North Atlantic Ocean showing the daily status of upcoming hurricanes.
Feeling the heat, missing snow, want to go skiing? Try out this interactive Antarctica simulation build with flash 3d.
via: Ehrensenf
The Arctic sea ice conditions are now very similar to last year. The maritime shortcuts through the Artic Sea are almost open or already open. The total extent two days before - the NSDIC reported yesterday - was 5.47 million square kilometers.
Buoys indicate surface melting is coming to an end while bottom melting of the ice will continue a few more weeks.
I was quite excited while visiting this UN site: data.un.org. You’ll find a huge amount of figures provided by different UN agencies. The data is free to use, ready to download and presented by a slick WEB2.0 interface. Of cource data from the UNFCCC is there as well as from the american Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC).
The latter provides a data set with CO2 emissions from more than 200 countries ranging from 1980 to 2004. I’ve jumped at this chance and started to develop google maps overlayed with colored countries. SVG was a dead-end, so the next question was how to generate tiles without having any record in hand painting.
GMapCreator was developed by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London under the GeoVUE (Geographic Virtual Urban Environments) project which is funded as one of the research nodes of the National Centre for eSocial Science (NCeSS).
In short it picks a shape file, let you colorize the polygons according to their attributes and renders all the tiles down to the level you specify. The world borders shape file from thematicmapping.org (credits to: Bjorn Sandvik, Schuyler Erle, Sean Gilles) was the best solution for this job. The simple version has enough points for a use with level 4. Btw: Quantum GIS is an excellent application for beginners.
Since human senses use logarithmic scales this is the way the map was designed. Also it is easier to distinguish different shades of green than blue. The values correspond to metric kilo tons of CO2.
Blue means no data, countries with an output over one billion tons are colored with dark red. Within these color groups GMapCreator shades the countries according to their past emissions. As a rule of thumb you may say the countries in the orange group emitted 10 times more C02 than the yellow countries.
At first sight the information provided by this interactive map is little: huge countries emit more C02 compared to smaller countries. But given the scale factor it indicates the countries with the most potential to fight Climate Change. Nevertheless the next map in this series will visualize emissions per capita and the United States will then - together with some litte arabian countries - lead this unreasonable competition.
However, this is not the end of this story. CO2 resides for approximatly 100 years in the atmosphere, so taken into account historical emissions will answer the question whose emissions are still heating the planet. Can responsibility-based politics really ignore past emissions?
Stay tuned on this channel.
While a proper configured WMS server is able to serve tiles off nearly all sizes some clients use an algorythm to stitch tiles with same size together. For example google maps usually request 256×256 px wide tiles.
Using bigger tiles leads to less requests against the server and faster display in your internet browser. On the server side the number of different tiles is no longer endless and a caching is an option. Lucian Plesea extended the WMS protocol to a tiled WMS and speeds up NASA’s JPL OnEarth WMS server.
The new map pack (1444) provides all served maps from this capabilities file except the single monthly Blue Marble Next Generation. Most interesting is Daily Terra combined with the 2007 version of Blue Marble as background. Daily Terra is updated every day and the colors match perfectly BMNG.
This map pack requests 512×512px sized tiles, the performance is much better than the standard OneEarth WMS - zooming and moving means more fun now. Unfortunatly WMS overlays do not work with this projection (for now), but all point data (placenames, weather, tropical storms, videos, hotels, photos, … ) are displayed at the right place.
Up to 80 different fires claimed already more than 50 lives in Greece, Europe. Yesterday Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis declared a nationwide state of emergency, mobilizing all resources.
International help started arriving today, with planes or firemen from France, Italy, and Cyprus and more help expected from Serbia, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Since June more than 3,000 fires have razed thousands of hectares of forests and scrubland across the country - nearly triple last year’s total - according to officials.
The smoke ranges from Greece to Tripolis, Lybia. Photo captured by Daily Terra - 2007-08-25.
Currently the amount of wildfires in Europe is scary. Though mostly inflamed by business interests or to satisfy the desire for revenge the weather conditions are to blame for spreading and impact.
At present the gallery of Modis shows more satellite pictures of wildfires all over the planet. Picture above is from NASA’s MAP ‘06 Project
The Black Sea forms an enclosed basin, located between south-eastern Europe and Asia Minor. In this satellite picture, captured by Daily Terra , 2007-02-24, cold wind from North-East condensates water vapour in warmer air over the sea and forms clouds.
Cyclone Favio made landfall Thursday in southern Mozambique with powerful winds over 200kph, heavy rains and new misery to tens of thousands of people already forced from their homes by flooding.
About 30 people were killed in Mozambique and nearly 90,000 forced from their homes by the floods. The government said 37,000 people were being housed in tented camps before Favio struck.
Mozambique’s worst disaster occurred recently in 2000-2001 when a series of cyclones caused flooding in southern and central parts of the country, killing 700 people and forcing close to half a million to leave their homes.
A second cyclone, called Gamede, is also expected to make landfall today. Depression 16s is still unnamed and may become tropical storm Humba.
Picture credit: Naval Research Labaratory Satellite view is updated daily.
Update: UNOSAT provides a map for the humanitarian community:
Zambezi Flood Monitoring Change Detection near Muturara [jpg, 3mb]
On February 6, 2007, Terra satellite shot this impressive picture showing cloud streets caused by strong wind over the Sea of Okhotsk. During the winter this part of Siberia is frozen and large chunks of sea ice float on the water.
More at Earth Observatory: Sea of Okhotsk or at Modis Web
The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) integrates remote sensing and GIS technologies to deliver MODIS active fire locations to natural resource managers and other stakeholders around the World in near real time. With a resolution of 1 square kilometers the service detects fires or thermal anomalies (volcanoes, …).
Fire detection is performed using a contextual algorithm that exploits the strong emission of mid-infrared radiation from fires. Under ideal conditions the smallest flaming fire that can be routinely detected is approximately 50 m
Last weekend Sweden was hit by a strong storm with wind speeds of more than 100kph. Falling trees killed at least five people and hundreds of thousands were left without power. An estimated amount of that 12 million cubic metres of forest was felled.
The bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark was temporarily shut to all traffic, while nearly all train departures in southern Sweden and parts of Norway were canceled. The Swedish weather service SMHI said the storm was the worst to hit the country in two years.
Germany’s famous North Sea island and symbol Sylt lost 700,00 m3 sand used to protect the coast. Climate scientists warn more and more efforts are needed to save island from rising sea levels and Climate Change.
Tomorrow depression Kyrill is expected to arrive in Germany with hurricane strength. German weather service DWD warns gusts will have up to 150kph and whole country should prepare for heavy rain and Beaufort 11-12.
zdf.de: Orkan “Kyrill” kommt nach Deutschland
Picture credit: Naval Research Laboratory
Last december and this January appears unusually mild to many people of the northern hemisphere. There are not only reports of higher temperatures, trees and flowers started to bloom in winter, ice bears dropped hibernation and migratory birds decided to stay home in their summer habitat.
NASA’s Earth Observatory used data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite and compared December surface temperature with average December temperatures from 2000-2005. Picture above shows hotter regions in red, some places have been up to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than in the recent past.
Nature prepares for Global Warming, when do mankind adapt?
Picture credit: Jesse Allen, based on data from Zhengming Wan, MODIS Land Surface Temperature Group, Institute for Computational Earth System Science, University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Cape Verde islands are in the mid-Atlantic, roughly off the coast of Mauritania and Senegal. Though 300miles away from continent Karman vortices are build and visible in this picture captured by Daily Terra, 2006-01-02.
Today tropical cyclone Clovis struck Madagascar. Clovis brought 1-minute maximum sustained winds to the region of around 120 km/h. Wind gusts in the area have been considerably higher. Captured by Daily Terra, 2007-01-02.
