Image from TERRA
Tue, 18 Apr 2023 16:24 EDT

The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, located in Katmai National Park, forms a unique and ashen landscape. Encircled by volcanoes – both active and inactive – it has served as a perfect collection area for huge amounts of volcanic ash.

Image from TERRA
Tue, 20 Sep 2022 10:30 EDT

Water departments in the West are using maps and models originally created by a NASA team to help track water.

Image from TERRA
Thu, 15 Sep 2022 10:00 EDT

NASA and Google broadened an existing partnership to help local governments improve their monitoring and prediction of air quality for better decision making.

Vegetation Limits City Warming Effects

isatemps_gis_2001The amount of vegetation in a city is an important factor in the urban heat island, where temperatures in urban areas rise an average of 1 to 3°C due to the absorption of  heat by asphalt, concrete, stone, steel, and other impervious surfaces. Vegetation helps cool these areas and a new study by NASA, shows how essential plant cover is.   Researchers modeled urban areas and their surroundings, using data from multiple satellites including MODIS on-board both Terra and Aqua and Landsat 7’s Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (EMT+), finding that areas covered partly by impervious surfaces had an average summer temperature 1.9°C higher than surrounding rural areas. In winter, the temperature difference was 1.5 °C higher. Lahouri Bounoua, a researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center and lead author, along with his colleagues used the model environment to simulate what the temperature would be for a city if all the impervious surfaces were replaced with vegetation.

Full story on the Earth Observatory

Full story on nasa.gov

 

 

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