Fires raged in Bolivia’s lowlands throughout much of August and September. On September 28, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image of smoke streaming south toward Paraguay.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145699/a-river-of-smoke
The ice shelf in East Antarctica has spawned its first major iceberg in more than half a century and Terra and Aqua were able to capture the event from September 13 – October 2.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145680/rifting-and-calving-on-the-amery-ice-shelf
A paper appearing recently in EOS shows that Terra data is continually being used to test new modeling processes. In this study, Terra cloud top height data was used as a tool to compare the results of the superparamertization model to data from a day in April, 2012 over the Netherlands. The superparameterization model produced results that more accurately depicted the cloud height data from Terra, than the standard parameterized version of OpenIFS.
Read the full research paper from the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001600, 2019
Terra is tracking fires in Indonesia. MODIS and VIIRS data have been used to count the number of blazes across the region, which is so far fewer than another recent fire year, 2015. However, some starts are burning in areas so thick with smoke that satellites can’t detect them or burning underground in Indonesia’s peat beds. Smoke, other aerosols, and emissions including carbon monoxide have been released into the air. Terra’s MISR, MODIS and MOPITT instruments track these airborne particles and chemicals, while new models are being tested.
Read more about Indonesia’s current fire season: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145614/smoke-blankets-borneo
Read more about Terra’s role in monitoring the historic 2015 fire season: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/IndonesianFires
With Amazon wildfires in the news, a study published in the journal of Ecohydrology uses ASTER data and data from the Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) to look at how changes to land cover in the Amazon affect the exchange of water and heat between the land surface and the atmosphere.