NASA

This summer between June 17 and July 2, NASA will fly aircraft over Baltimore, Philadelphia, parts of Virginia, and California to collect data on air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. The campaign supports the NASA Student Airborne Research Program for undergraduate interns. The East Coast flights will take place from June 17-26. Researchers and students ...

A research initiative, funded by NASA and the Army Corps of Engineers, is underway to study permafrost thaw in Alaska and its significant impacts on the environment. This project aims to understand the landforms created by thawing permafrost, how it affects methane emissions and whether the rate of permafrost thaw is accelerating. Leading this research ...

The Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer (EDGE)—a newly proposed NASA satellite mission to monitor the three-dimensional structure of global vegetation and ice—is one of four finalists selected for NASA’s next generation of Earth-observing satellites under the Earth System Explorers Program. The project, which includes Northern Arizona University assistant research professor Chris Hakkenberg as co-investigator and biodiversity ...

Information from the PREFIRE mission will illuminate how clouds and water vapor in the Arctic and Antarctic influence the amount of heat the poles radiate into space. A pair of new shoebox-size NASA satellites will help unravel an atmospheric mystery that’s bedeviled scientists for years: how the behavior of clouds and water vapor at Earth’s ...

NASA has made new data available that can provide air pollution observations at unprecedented resolutions – down to the scale of individual neighborhoods. The near real-time data comes from the agency’s TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) instrument, which launched last year to improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality ...

NASA’s “Wildfire Digital Twin” project will equip firefighters and wildfire managers with a superior tool for monitoring wildfires and predicting harmful air pollution events and help researchers observe global wildfire trends more precisely. The tool, developed with funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office and NASA’s FireSense Program, will use artificial intelligence and machine learning ...

NASA has selected four proposals for concept studies of missions to help us better understand Earth science key focus areas for the benefit of all including greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents, and changes in ice and glaciers around the world. These four investigations are part of the agency’s new Earth System Explorers ...

For many Hawaiian farmers, agriculture is more than a profession; it is their kuleana, or responsibility. It is a practice with deep cultural roots tied to the ancient concept of aloha ʻāina—love and responsible stewardship of the land. Despite this cultural connection to farming, agricultural production and food systems across Hawai’i have suffered from decades ...

Over the next few weeks, NASA aircraft will fly over South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region and collect ultraviolet, visual, thermal and other imagery of its terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. These preliminary images will be publicly available and posted online here within hours of the aircraft landing each day. Combined with satellite imagery and field ...

On Sept. 29, 2009, an 8.1-magnitude earthquake struck near American Samoa, Samoa, and Tonga, triggering a tsunami that caused human casualties and $200 million in property damage on the islands. The earthquake also exacerbated another problem in American Samoa: subsidence, or the sinking of land. When combined with relative sea level rise, land sinking can ...

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument collected its “first light” measurements of nitrogen dioxide air pollution over North America on August 2, 2023. Beginning at 11:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time (8:15 AM Pacific Time), the instrument scanned the continent every hour for six consecutive hours. TEMPO measures sunlight reflected and scattered off the ...

IBM and open-source AI platform Hugging Face today announced that IBM’s watsonx.ai geospatial foundation model – built from NASA’s satellite data – will now be openly available on Hugging Face. It will be the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA. The model ...

This summer, as wildfire smoke blankets large swaths of North America and heat-stoked summer haze reaches its seasonal peak, NASA and its partners are deploying several new tools to observe air quality and pollution from the street to the stratosphere. Launched into orbit earlier this spring, TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is ...

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Monday hosted NASA administrator Bill Nelson and U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley at the presidential palace. According to a statement from the Brazilian government, Mr. Nelson spoke of the possibility of supporting Brazil’s fight against deforestation with the help of new aircraft capable of capturing precise photographs of fires, ...

The governments of the United States and India have agreed to work more closely together in spaceflight, with India signing the Artemis Accords and the two countries planning for a joint mission of some kind to the International Space Station. In a fact sheet distributed by the White House, the governments said they agreed that ...

Using forecasts run on a NASA supercomputer, scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; the University of California, Berkeley; and the Korea National University of Transportation assessed the ability of NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Subseasonal to Seasonal Version 2 (GEOS-S2S-2) forecasting system to predict atmospheric and land surface conditions ...

An accessible new mapping tool will make it easier for individuals and communities to plan for flooding and sea level rise. Developed by the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) at Columbia Climate School’s CIESIN, the mapper visualizes spatial data for infrastructure across nearly all of New York State, except New York City. The ...

NASA and Rocket Lab launched two of the agency’s CubeSats on Sunday to study tropical cyclones with greater frequency than existing satellites, according to an agency announcement. The CubeSats were launched on an Electron Rocket from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex in New Zealand at 9pm EDT on Sunday—or 1pm NZST on Monday. The launch was ...

Nearly a quarter of the world’s population now lives in a flood zone, and that number is expected to climb as rising seas and heavier storms triggered by a changing climate put more people at risk. The ability to accurately map flooding events can be key to not only protecting people and property now but ...

Ante el incremento de incendios forestales en nuestro país, el año pasado consumieron más de 730,000 hectáreas de bosques y selvas, investigadores del Instituto de Geografía (IGf) de la UNAM, realizan un monitoreo satelital permanente a través de un sistema automatizado de visualización para la detección de puntos de calor que permite alertar de forma ...

Scientists routinely rely on data-intensive analysis and visualization of satellite observations to track Earth’s ever-changing surface. A new project will make it possible for anyone with an internet connection to begin to answer these questions and more about changes to our dynamic planet. The OPERA (Observational Products for End-Users from Remote Sensing Analysis) project is ...

Using two decades of NASA satellite measurements stored in the cloud, scientists recently assessed the vulnerability of Belize’s renowned coral reefs to bleaching and collapse. The findings could help management authorities protect the reefs from human impacts such as development, overfishing, pollution, and climate change. In a study published in Frontiers in Remote Sensing, the ...

The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission—led by NASA and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES)—has sent back some of its first glimpses of water on the planet’s surface, showing ocean currents like the Gulf Stream in unprecedented detail. The spatial resolution of SWOT ocean measurements is 10 times greater than the composite ...

A first count of trees in Africa’s drylands has enabled scientists to calculate how much carbon they store and could help devise better conservation strategies for the region and beyond, a study said Wednesday. The number of trees in the vast region—the count came to nearly 10 billion—has not been known up to now, and ...

NASA’s Ames Research Center will leverage NextNav’s TerraPoiNT commercial grade network to capture inflight data on drone navigation, detection and collision avoidance as part of BVLOS testing for its urban air mobility (UAM) program. Via a network of terrestrial beacons, TerraPoiNT provides precise geolocation services when GPS signals aren’t available. NASA will use TerraPoiNT to ...

IBM and NASA are collaborating for initiating improved climate change research. It was announced on February 1, that IBM is going to work together with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to use artificial intelligence for climate change research in an effort to greatly improve research analysis of these large datasets. The aim is to make ...

The agreement focuses on extending access to the broader global community of NASA’s geospatial content for continued research and exploration—including new datasets from nearly 100 spaceborne sensors, measuring atmospheric health, land-based phenomena, and characteristics of the oceans. Partner efforts under this agreement will add to the existing NASA data in ArcGIS Living Atlas of the ...

Most farm fields in the U.S. Midwest lay bare over the winter. From the time of corn and soybean harvests—sometime between September and December—until the planting season in spring, valuable topsoil is often unprotected. Wind, snowmelt, and rain can remove topsoil and nutrients from fields and carry them into the Mississippi River, where, instead of ...

LORIS, a shoebox-sized nanosatellite designed and built by students in the Dalhousie Space Systems Lab over the past several years, was finally released last Thursday (Dec. 29) by NASA after its ascent to the International Space Station late last fall. The student team, led by Engineering Masters student Arad Gharagozli, created the satellite as part ...

Just four days after heavy rain hit California, the state was drenched with another atmospheric river on January 4 and 5, 2023. A plume of moisture from the tropical Pacific interacted with a low-pressure system that rapidly strengthened over the northeast Pacific, producing a storm that caused flooding, toppled trees, and downed power lines. This ...