Whereas aerosols can influence climate by scattering light and changing Earth’s reflectivity, they can also alter the climate via clouds. On a global scale, these aerosol “indirect effects” typically ...

Desertification. The word invokes images of sand dunes blowing over abandoned farms as some irresistible, dark force steadily transforms fertile fields into inhospitable wasteland. The United Nations’ ...

The water, or hydrologic, cycle describes the pilgrimage of water as water molecules make their way from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere and back again, in some cases to below the surface. This ...

All matter in the universe that has a temperature above absolute zero (the temperature at which all atomic or molecular motion stops) radiates energy across a range of wavelengths in the ...

Joshua Stevens was the lead visualizer of NASA’s Earth Observatory from 2015 to 2023. He has researched and taught cartographic design, geovisual analytics, and remote sensing for more than a decade.

Variations in TSI are due to a balance between decreases caused by sunspots and increases caused by bright areas called faculae which surround sunspots. Sunspots are dark blotches on the Sun in which ...

Welcome, teachers, to Mission: Biomes! This site was designed for teachers to use in classrooms as a supplementary, interdisciplinary unit. Mission: Biomes is especially appropriate for grades 3 ...

Cochrane and his team looked back at satellite images of deforestation in the Paragominas region of Brazil, one of numerous settlements along the “Arc of Deforestation,” on the developing frontier of ...

The idea of mapping evapotranspiration with Landsat data was not new. In fact it was a problem scientists had been trying—mostly without success—to solve for two and half decades. Landsat doesn’t ...

Agencies and scientists across the globe continue to use Landsat data to monitor deforestation and to enforce environmental policies. For example, in 2003, the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, piloted a ...

The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when nutrients are plentiful and more ...

Three hundred forty watts per square meter of incoming solar power is a global average; solar illumination varies in space and time. The annual amount of incoming solar energy varies considerably from ...