Tag: Earth’s Surface and Interior

Earth’s Surface and Interior

Spring is here — and so are the Terra science team meetings and workshops! Here’s a list of upcoming Team Meetings and Workshops related to the Terra mission, with additional information about each in the post below this list.

  • 2023 MODIS/VIIRS Science Team Meeting
  • 2023 NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Science Team Meeting
  • CERES 38th Science Team Meeting
  • UCAR Remote Sensing Initiative Workshop
  • NASA’s Terra, Aqua, and Aura Data Continuity Workshop

2023 MODIS/VIIRS Science Team Meeting

The MODIS/VIIRS Science Team Meeting will be held May 1- 4, 2023 at The Hotel at The University of Maryland. Registration will be available soon. Stay tuned to the MODIS Website for more information as it’s made available.


2023 NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Science Team Meeting 

NASA’s Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems (CC&E) focus area will be hosting the next Joint Science Workshop (JSW) on May 8-12, 2023 at The Hotel in College Park, MD. The first two days (May 8-9) will be LCLUC meeting with an emphasis on the early career scientists’ projects. Next two days will be joint meeting with other NASA Earth Science programs of the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area at plenary sessions. For more information, visit the LCLUC Meeting website.


CERES 38th Science Team Meeting

The CERES 38th Science Team Meeting will be held May 9-11, 2023 at the Pearl Young Theater on the campus of Langley Research Center, Hampton VA. For more information and a PDF of the agenda, please visit the CERES website.


UCAR Remote Sensing Initiative Workshop

This new Initiative provides a focal point for UCAR satellite remote sensing instrumentation, data and science activities, and promotes collaboration across the organization. For more information on this event, visit the UCAR Remote Sensing Initiative website.


NASA’s Terra, Aqua, and Aura Data Continuity Workshop

Image of the three satellites - Terra, Aqua, and Aura - with the following text: Request for Information to inform NASA's Terra, Aqua, and Aura Data Continuity Workshop

NASA recently released a new NASA Request for Information (RFI), seeking input from the science community and stakeholders on data product continuity needs, capabilities, and gaps as NASA’s Terra, Aqua, and Aura missions reach the end of their operational life.

NASA will use these RFI responses to help plan a Terra/Aqua/Aura data continuity workshop. This workshop will determine needs, evaluate current capabilities, identify gaps, and specify potential actions for these missions. The Terra, Aqua, and Aura Data Continuity Workshop will be virtual and is currently scheduled for May 23-25, 2023, from 11am – 4pm Eastern Time.

For more information and updates, visit the NASA NSPIRES platform (linked above), review the full RFI PDF linked here, or see the following linked FAQ document.

It’s been a busy summer for the MODIS instrument! Here are a few highlights you may have missed:

‣ On July 1st, our long-serving MODIS instrument lead, Dr. Michael King, officially retired. While we’re sad to see him go and wish him the best in his new adventures, we’re excited to introduce our new MODIS lead, Dr. Miguel Roman! Look for his updated bio on the Terra website soon.

‣ The NASA Land and Atmosphere data teams held meetings in May and June (you can find presentation materials and more info with this link to the MODIS newsfeed). 

‣ A brand new reprocessed MODIS cloud properties dataset that combines both Terra and Aqua data is now available for download and use. Find out more information in this informative post from the LAADS DAAC

‣ Check out these two recent research features on the Natural Capital Project (links here and here), a collaboration among scientists, farmers, and the luxury clothing industry. Terra MODIS vegetation index data products are being used as part of this effort to model future goat-grazing land use in order to benefit both farmers and the environment. Frequent sampling and wide area coverage of MODIS normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) dataset were leveraged and used as input for climate models, resulting in more sustainable land-use practices.

 

On May 6, 2018 as Kilauea continued to erupt, MISR passed overhead at approximately 11 a.m. local time, capturing this view of the island. While much of the island is covered by clouds, the eruption plume is visible streaming southwest over the ocean starting at the fissure on Hawaii’s eastern point. MISR uses it’s unique, nine-angle view to calculate plume height. This image is from one of MISR’s forward pointing cameras. The plume height is relatively low, meaning that gas and ash are staying near the ground, potentially causing health risks from poor air quality downwind.

Read more:

 

Ash from Kilauea Eruption Viewed by NASA’s MISR on NASA JPL’s Photojournal

 

When volcanoes erupt, ASTER turns its attention to documenting the changes to the landscape as they happen. ASTER is uniquely capable of turning to see areas where volcanoes are erupting in very high resolution (between 15 in the thermal bands – 90 meter spatial resolution in the visible light spectral bands).

As Hawaii’s Kilauea continues to erupt, ASTER continues to monitor the eruption from space. This image from May 6, 2018 shows the sulfur dioxide being released from the volcano in yellow and yellow-green.

Read more:

Satellite View of Kilauea Eruption from NASA JPL

 

The tiny Aleutian island of Bogoslof in Alaska, erupting regularly since December 2016, produced fresh activity on Sunday, May 28, 2017. Bogoslof is a stratovolcano fueled by the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the North American Plate and forms part of the larger Aleutian Arc, which includes more than 60 volcanoes on the Aleutian Islands and the Aleutian Range on the Alaska mainland. Previous to its recent period of activity, Bogoslof had last erupted in 1992, and its above-water surface area was a mere 0.11 square miles (0.29 square kilometers). As of March 11, the most recent data available, the area of the island had tripled to 0.38 square miles (0.98 square kilometers). The event on May 28 produced an ash cloud that reached 40,000 feet (12 km) in altitude, causing the Alaskan Volcano Observatory to issue a red alert for air travel in the area. Volcanic ash can cause major damage to aircraft engines, and the region is close to several major air routes between North America and Asia.

On May 28, 2017, at approximately 2:23 p.m. local time, NASA’s Terra satellite passed over Bogoslof, less than 10 minutes after the eruption began. MISR has nine cameras that view Earth at different angles. It takes slightly less than seven minutes for all nine cameras to view the same location on Earth. On the left, an animation made from the images from the nine MISR cameras, captured between 2:19 and 2:26 p.m., demonstrates how the angled views give a glimpse of the underside of the growing plume of volcanic ash, showing the eruption column widening into the cloud at the top.

Data from MISR’s nine cameras can also be used to calculate the height of the plume, based on the apparent movement of the cloud from one camera to another. On the right, a map of plume height is plotted over the downward-looking image. The top of the cloud was approximately 10,000 feet (3 kilometers) high at this time. Below the image is a scatterplot of the heights, with blue points representing heights corrected by the northwesterly winds reported by the Alaskan Volcano Observatory during the eruption, and red points representing uncorrected heights. Lower points at either side of the plume represent retrievals of the eruption column.

These data were captured during Terra orbit 92786. The stereoscopic analysis was performed using the MISR INteractive eXplorer (MINX) software tool, which is publicly available through the Open Channel Foundation at https://www.openchannelsoftware.com/projects/MINX. Other MISR data are available through the NASA Langley Research Center; for more information, go to https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/misr/misr_table. MISR was built and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. The Terra spacecraft is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The MISR data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center in Hampton, Virginia. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL-Caltech, MISR Team, article by Abbey Nasten