Happy Earth Day

Earthrise over the moon as seen by the astronauts of Apollo 8 on December 22, 1968.


This was not the first image of the isolated Earth from space. It was the first which contrasted in the same image the wet, blue and green, atmospheric Earth with the barren, dusted, lifeless Moon.

The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. The horizon, about 570 kilometers (250 statute miles) from the spacecraft, is near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from the Earth. On the earth, the sunset terminator crosses Africa. The south pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds. The lunar surface probably has less pronounced color than indicated by this print.

40 Years of Earth

Earthrise over the moon as seen by the astronauts of Apollo 8 on December 22, 1968.


This iconic image has become my regular Earth Day illustration. It was not the first image of the isolated Earth from space. It was the first which contrasted in the same image the wet, blue and green, atmospheric Earth with the barren, dusted, lifeless Moon.

It is easy to deceive ourselves that we can exploit the Earth and dehumanize others - basically, sh*t where we eat and sleep - without consequences. It is hard to see, concretely and measurably, how interconnected and interdependent we are.

Images like those above remind us that we are alone, isolated, and fragile. We are stewards of the Earth. We are gardeners of the world. It's our responsibility now.

Apollo: a personal/biographical perspective

40 years ago, we watched the landing on television like much of the rest of the world. Days before, my father had packed our little family into the car and drove to the causeway overlooking the Kennedy Space Center to watch, and feel, Apollo 11 send men to land on the moon for the first time. My father worked for Grumman, which had the contract to develop the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), later dubbed simply the Lunar Module (LM), for the Apollo space program. He worked on the LEM's telemetry systems. Part of my father is on the moon.

My Dad at work, circa 1960s


My family moved twice while I was growing up. Until I moved to New York City, I didn't live anywhere longer than six years. In the winter of 1964-1965, we moved from Long Island, east of new York City, to Merritt Island, Florida. As you can see from this map, our home was just a little over 10 miles from the Apollo 11 launchpad. I used to watch rockets launch from my bedroom window. On most launches, our windows shook.


View Apollo in a larger map

The Apollo program had an enormous economic and human toll, an important part of the story which I've yet to read anywhere else. Shortly after we moved to Florida, my father began working 60-80 hours a week, a pace which didn't let up until nearly the end of the development program. Once it became routine to send men to the moon, the development program ended abruptly. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs simultaneously in a region whose development was triggered by this one program. My dad was able to find another job within Grumman, but it required moving back to Long Island. With no buyers, we were only able to sell our home at a greatly reduced price, losing all our equity, and having nothing with which to buy a new home.

We moved back to Long Island in the fall of 1970, just in time for me to start the school year, though just one week late.

[bit.ly]

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Happy Earth Day

Earthrise, Apollo VIII, December 22, 1968


I remember when we first received images of the earth from space. This image, taken by Apollo VIII astronauts returning to Earth after circumnavigating the moon, was not the first. But, showing the green, wet, full-of-life, and finite Earth in stark contrast to the dry, lifeless Moon, it helped energize the environmental movement.

The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. The horizon, about 570 kilometers (250 statute miles) from the spacecraft, is near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from the Earth. On the earth, the sunset terminator crosses Africa. The south pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds. The lunar surface probably has less pronounced color than indicated by this print.
- NASA Earth Observatory

Gardening by Satellite

Here in Brooklyn, at the end of last week and into the weekend, we got drenched with a couple days of rain. Fellow gardeners in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, I sympathize.

In this image, snow is red and orange, while liquid water is black. By the time this image was taken [On December 13], the top layer of ice was undoubtedly starting to melt, and the resulting watery ice ranges from dark red to black. The icy region extends over parts of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire ... The normally green-blue tone of plant-covered land is nearly black throughout most of New Hampshire, the state most severely affected by the storm.
- New England Ice Storm, NASA Earth Observatory

If you've blogged about the ice storm in your area, give us a link!

Links

New England Ice Storm, NASA Earth Observatory

The following Garden Bloggers reported on the ice storm where they are.
Common Weeder, Heath, Massachusetts
Garden Path, Scarborough, Maine
The Vermont Gardener, Marshfield, Vermont

Fall Approaches, 2008

I've been watching fall advance locally: first the red of the Dogwoods, the yellow of the Locusts, the psychedelia of the White Ash. When my system gets back up and running, I'll have some photos of my own to share. Meanwhile, NASA treats us with their annual satellite perspective on the phenomenon. This is how it looked about two weeks ago.

Fall was beginning to color the East Coast of the United States when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image on October 12, 2008. Orange touches trees in the north and at higher elevations, where temperatures are cooler. Lower elevations are still green. The fall color follows the sweep of the Appalachian Mountains through Pennsylvania, New York, and into New England.
- Fall Color in the US Northeast, NASA Earth Observatory

The image also illustrates the dense population of the East Coast. Cities are gray in this photo-like image. The greater New York City region covers a large area on the coast. Boston, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island are also clearly visible.

Related Posts

2007:

• Fall Approaches
  
• The Luminous Streets
  

2006:

• Fall Color in Beverley Square West
• More Fall Color in Beverley Square West
  

Links

Fall Color in the US Northeast, NASA Earth Observatory

Happy Earth Day!

Earthrise, Apollo 8, December 22, 1968.

Satellite Image of Northeast's First Snow of the Season

A string of storms brought the season’s first snow to the eastern United States from the mid-Atlantic states to New England during the first week of December 2007. By December 6, most of the clouds had cleared, providing the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite this view of the snow-covered landscape. The snow highlights the contours of the land. Waves and curves follow the gentle folds of the Appalachian Mountains through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The more rugged mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York wrinkle the surface of the land.
- First Snow in the US Northeast, NASA Earth Observatory

The snow also makes rivers and lakes more visible than they might otherwise be. The dark blue-green Finger Lakes of upstate New York pop out against the surrounding white land. The long narrow lakes formed when glaciers scoured, deepened, and eventually dammed stream valleys. The lakes point north and northwest to the shores of Lake Ontario, portions of which are visible beneath a bank of clouds in this image. The northern shore of Lake Erie similarly peaks through the clouds to the west. In the far north, particularly in Maine and Canada, lakes have already started to freeze. The ice is a smooth, bright white surface in contrast to the slightly darker land.

To the south, snow-covered Maryland surrounds the northern Chesapeake Bay, starkly outlining the ragged shoreline where rivers and streams enter the bay. The largest river flowing into the Chesapeake is the Susquehanna, which cuts southeast across the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania.

Here's a closer view of the NYC area.

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First Snow of the Season

Links

First Snow in the US Northeast, NASA Earth Observatory

Images: Fires in Southern California

Update 2007.10.24: NASA continues to publish updated satellite imagery of the fires and the natural phenomena driving them. Check the sidebar of their page for "Other Images for this Event".

By Wednesday morning, 600,000 people had been displaced by the fires. By the afternoon, CNN upped the estimate to over 900,000.

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Image acquired 2007.10.22 13:55 PDT

Watching the news this morning before going to work, I was shocked to hear that a quarter of a million people - 250,000 - have been displaced by the fires in California. This satellite image, taken less than 24 hours ago, provides some sense of the scale of what's going on there.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, wildfires ignited in the paper-dry, drought-stricken vegetation of Southern California over the weekend of October 20, 2007, and exploded into massive infernos that forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their communities. Driven by Santa Ana winds, fires grew thousands of acres in just one to two days. The fires sped down from the mountains into the outskirts of coastal cities, including San Diego. Dozens of homes have burned to the ground, and at least one person has died, according to local news reports. Several of the fires were burning completely out of control as of October 22.
...
The drought in the Southwest throughout summer 2007 has been “extreme” according to the categories used by the U.S. Drought Monitor. Dry vegetation and Santa Ana winds, which can reach hurricane force as they race downslope from the deserts of the Great Basin and through narrow mountain passes, are often a devastating combination in Southern California. According to the Incident Management Situation Report [PDF] from the National Interagency Fire Center for October 22, Santa Ana winds were expected to continue through Wednesday.

- Fires in Southern California, NASA Earth Observatory

Links
California Fire News (Blog)
CNN Coverage
NASA: Fires in Southern California

We Are All One World

NASA images by Reto Stöckli, based on data.


Spectacular composite images from NASA. If you have the bandwidth, definitely check out the full size renditions (Eastern hemisphere, and my home, the Western hemisphere), each of which is nearly 3MB in size. You'll feel like you're floating in space over the earth.

These are not photographs. These are carefully constructed from large databases of images taken at many different times and places.

Drawing on data from multiple satellite missions (not all collected at the same time), a team of NASA scientists and graphic artists created layers of global data for everything from the land surface, to polar sea ice, to the light reflected by the chlorophyll in the billions of microscopic plants that grow in the ocean. They wrapped these layers around a globe, set it against a black background, and simulated the hazy edge of the Earth’s atmosphere (the limb) that appears in astronaut photography of the Earth.
...
Most of the data layers in this visualization are available as monthly composites as part of NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation image collection. The images in the collection appear in cylindrical projection (rectangular maps), and they are available at 500-meter resolution. The large images provided above are the full-size versions of these globes. In their hope that these images will inspire people to appreciate the beauty of our home planet and to learn about the Earth system, the developers of these images encourage readers to re-use and re-publish the images freely.

- Twin Blue Marbles, NASA Earth Observatory

Fall Approaches

Fall Colors around Lake Superior, September 23, 2007. Credit: NASA Terra-MODIS (Satellite-Sensor)

The autumnal equinox of 2007 occurred at 09:51 UTC on Sunday, September 23, or 05:51 Eastern Time. "Autumnal" instead of "Fall" because:

1. It's okay to use for both hemispheres.
   
2. Also, you could use this term on any other planets on which you should find yourself.

In northeastern North America, we measure fall by the changes in foliage. And it's on its way south from Canada.

The calendar may have set September 23 as the first day of autumn in 2007, but the forests that line the eastern shore of Lake Superior had already started to mark the turning of the season. By September 23, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this photo-like image, the forests of northern Michigan and southern Ontario flamed orange as the first trees of the season—maples—began to display their brilliant red and orange fall colors. Veins of green run through the sea of orange where the deciduous forest gives way to deep green pine trees.

The most vivid color is concentrated in Canada’s Ontario Province. Located farther south, Michigan’s trees show only a hint of color. ...

The large image provides an unusually cloud-free view of all of the Great Lakes. Similar spots of color stretch across southern Canada and parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The northern plains of the United States have started to turn yellow as grasses ripen, but the eastern forests in Pennsylvania and New York remain deep green.

- Fall Colors around Lake Superior, NASA Earth Observatory

New York State operates its own fall foliage watch. You can track the progress of the changes on the map provided on their Web site. They were predicting "vibrant, near-peak autumn color" this past weekend for the Adirondacks, the peachy area in northern New York state on the map below.

Here in NYC, we're still in the green, but I've been watching the subtle changes. Individual trees in my neighborhood, including the cherry tree in my backyard, are already picking up shades of yellow and orange.

Vernal equinox and autumnal equinox. These names are direct derivatives of Latin (ver = spring, autumnus = autumn), and as such more apt to be found in writings. Although in principle they are subject to the same problem as the spring/autumn names, their use over the centuries has fixed them to the viewpoint of the northern hemisphere. As such the vernal equinox is the equinox where the Sun passes from south to north [across the equator], and is a zeropoint in some celestial coordinate systems. The name of the other equinox is used less often.
- Wikipedia:Equinox:Names

Links

Wikipedia: Equinox
I Love NY (State) Fall Foliage Report

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Canaries in the Coal Mine: Honeybees and Climate Change

NASA scientist Wayne Esaias believes that a beehive's seasonal cycle of weight gain and loss is a sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change on flowering plants. A hobbyist beekeeper, he has found signals of climate change in his records of the weight of his beehives, and wants to enlist other beekeepers to contribute their observations as well:

The 25-year NASA veteran has made a career studying patterns of plant growth in the world’s oceans and how they relate to climate and ecosystem change, first from ships, then from aircraft, and finally from satellites. But for the past year, he’s been preoccupied with his bee hives, which started as a family project around 1990 when his son was in the Boy Scouts. According to his honeybees, big changes are underway in Maryland forests. The most important event in the life of flowering plants and their pollinators—flowering itself—is happening much earlier in the year than it used to. - Buzzing About Climate Change

[The] 1-to-5-kilometer-radius area in which a hive’s worker bees forage is the same spatial scale that many ecological and climate models use to predict ecosystems’ responses to climate change. It also matches the spatial scale of satellite images of vegetation collected by NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. This similarity of scale means that all these ways of studying ecosystems could be integrated into a more sophisticated picture of how plant and animal communities will respond to climate change than any one method alone could provide. Esaias is particularly interested in comparing the hive data to satellite-based maps of vegetation “greenness,” a scale that remote-sensing scientists commonly use to map the health and density of Earth’s vegetation. Scientists have been making these types of maps for decades, and they have used them to document how warming temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are causing vegetation to green up earlier in the spring than it did in the 1980s. Such maps are an excellent general indicator of seasonal changes in vegetation, says Esaias, but by themselves, they won’t tell you something as tangible as when plants are flowering. - Will Plants and Pollinators Get Out of Sync?

About half of the approximately 6 million honeybee colonies in the United States are kept by individual or family-scale beekeepers. Esaias’ vision is to develop a how-to guide, an automatic data recorder, and the computer and networking resources at Goddard Space Flight Center that would be needed to collect and preserve the data. Ideally, a hive data recorder would be hooked up to the Internet so that volunteers’ hive weights could appear on a Website hosted at Goddard. His goal is to get the cost per kit below $200 and then to get NASA funding to outfit a network of volunteers — HoneybeeNet — and analyze their data. “Ultimately, what we’d like to have is thousands of these across the country. Even if we can get the cost down to $200 a piece, that is still a lot of money to ask for until you have a test data set that proves it is valuable,” admits Esaias. He’s been working with local bee clubs in Maryland, rounding up some 20 volunteers who already have or are willing to purchase their own scales. He hopes that the data collected during the 2007 spring-summer season will be a prototype that will convince NASA to fund a pilot project.

Links: HoneybeeNet Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) Heat Island Effect

2006 was the fifth-warmest year on record

NASA reports that the five warmest years on record were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2006. Put another way, four of the fifth warmest years on record occurred in the last five years. And they expect 2007 to be even warmer than 2006.

The top image is a global map showing temperature anomalies during 2006, blue being the coolest and red being the warmest. Areas with cooler-than-average temperatures appear primarily in the northern Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean, as well as the interior of Antarctica. The very warmest regions appear in the Arctic and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is consistent with climate predictions that global warming will occur more quickly and dramatically in high latitudes. The red colors that dominate the image reveal the overall warmth of 2006 compared to the long-term average.


The graph below the image tracks mean global temperatures compared to the 1951 to 1980 mean. This graph shows two lines, the 5-year mean, indicated in red, and the annual mean, indicated in pink. Temperatures peaked around 1940 then fell in the 1950s. By the early 1980s, temperatures surpassed those of the 1940s and, despite ups and downs from year to year, they continued rising beyond the year 2000.


- NASA Earth Observatory

News, August 1, 2006: NASA Earth Observatory Maps NYC's Heat Island, Block by Block

Timely enough, given the record temperatures we're experiencing this week. Tomorrow's forecast has been "upgraded" from what I reported yesterday: the THI may reach 117F tomorrow.

Temperatures in New York City as measured by Landsat on August 14, 2002, at 10:30am, during a heat wave. Cooler temperatures are blue, hotter are yellow.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Map by Robert Simmon, using data from the Landsat Program.


Temperatures in New York City as measured by Landsat on August 14, 2002, at 10:30am, during a heat wave. Cooler temperatures are blue, hotter are yellow.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Map by Robert Simmon, using data from the Landsat Program.


The ability of vegetation to moderate urban temperatures is graphically demonstrated in these paired images from NASA's Earth Observatory. The spatial resolution of these images is 60 meters per pixel. At that scale, I can just about make out the block where I garden:

Closeup of the vegetation map, centered on central Brooklyn. The green area at the left is Greenwood Cemetery. Prospect Park is the dark green area at the top; the white area within it is Prospect Lake.


Below the park, to the south, Victorian Flatbush, with its tree-lined streets, detached wood frame houses, and front lawns, spreads out as a series of olive green areas. The beige areas in-between the olive are rowhouses and apartment buildings. You can even make out a curving green line across the southern end of this area: That's the old LIRR right-of-way, long abandoned, and overgrown with trees.

NASA has just published a report on urban heat islands highlighting the research of Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist with the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and his colleagues:

In the summer of 2002, Gaffin and his colleagues used satellite temperature data, city-wide land cover maps, and weather data, along with a regional climate model to identify the best strategies for cooling the city. The team estimated how much cooling the city could achieve by planting trees, replacing dark surfaces with lighter ones, and installing vegetation-covered “green roofs.”
The team studied the city as a whole, as well as six “hotspot” areas—including parts of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn—where air temperatures near the ground were higher than the city-wide average. Each area was serviced by Con Edison, the local power company, so the scientists could compare electricity use. Each area also had available space so that the mitigation strategies the team considered could be modeled in the study and potentially implemented later on.
August 14 fell on one of the hottest heat wave days in New York’s summer of 2002, making it a good day to take the city’s temperature. Measuring the temperature of every last sidewalk, street, parking lot, roof, garden, and grassy area in an entire city isn’t easily done from the ground, so the researchers relied on NASA to take the city’s temperature from the sky. NASA’s Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper collected thermal infrared satellite data. ...
- Beating the Heat in the World's Big Cities

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