Lake Titicaca in Sunglint The optical phenomenon revealed features on and below the Peruvian lake’s surface, such as wind patterns, natural surface films, and boat wakes. Published Jul 7, 2025 Image ...

To understand how the Earth’s climate system balances the energy budget, we have to consider processes occurring at the three levels: the surface of the Earth, where most solar heating takes place; ...

NASA employs the world’s largest concentration of climate scientists. NASA’s mission to study Earth involves monitoring atmospheric conditions, global temperatures, land cover and vegetation, ice ...

References: Burian, S., and Shepherd, J. (2005). Effect of urbanization on the diurnal rainfall pattern in Houston. Hydrological Processes, 19, 1089-1103. Jin, M., and Shepherd, J. (2005) Inclusion of ...

Bridging the Data Gap “IceBridge exists because we need to understand how much ice the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise over the next couple of decades,” says ...

There are several ways space-based technologies can help us understand where species live and why they live there. One way is to directly observe species using satellite sensors with spatial ...

A string of dry years shriveled vegetation in Africa's Sahel, causing some to fear that the Sahara Desert was shifting south. Satellite data spanning more than twenty years now shows that the Sahel is ...

In 2011, scientists from North Carolina, France, and Peru saw that deforestation in a portion of the Amazon rainforest was proceeding at an unusual pace in an unexpected place. Images from the Landsat ...

The U.S. National Park Service celebrated its centennial in 2016, commemorating 100 years of stewardship of America’s natural and historic treasures. Many of those monuments, scenic rivers, parks, and ...

Watson’s own study of the Australian zircons supports the idea of a cooler, wetter Hadean. Several years ago, Watson and the students working in his lab began work on a titanium “thermometer”—an ...

Most materials published on the Earth Observatory, including images, are freely available for re-publication or re-use, including commercial purposes, except for where copyright is indicated. In those ...

Updated Oct 19, 2019 World of Change: Antarctic Ozone Hole In the early 1980s, scientists began to realize that CFCs were creating a thin spot—a hole—in the ozone layer over Antarctica every spring.