earth observatory

Imagery from the Louisiana flooding

May 17, 2011

A couple of days ago we showed you the location of the Morganza Spillway and the expected flood area, and now some fresh satellite imagery is coming in to show what’s actually been happening.

The imagery comes via GeoEye, and covers various parts of the Mississippi River from Illinois down to Louisiana. You can view all of the imagery using this KML file that Google unveiled last night.

For more, you can check out some additional imagery that was captured on Sunday and shown on the NASA Earth Observatory site, or see it in Google Earth with this KML file (note — it’s a 4MB image, so it make take a few seconds to load).

The white area next to the spillway is whitewater being churned up by the fierce flow of water, and you can clearly see fields and other nearby areas that have been flooded. I expect we’ll see more imagery from this area in the coming weeks as the water continues to rise.

NASA captures amazing image of Hurricane Paula

October 15, 2010

A few days ago, Hurricane Paula was bearing down on Honduras and Mexico. While it caused some substantial flooding and destroyed some homes, it weakened rather quickly and is now a tropical storm near Cuba.

However, three days ago as the storm was battering the coast of Honduras, NASA’s MODIS captured a stunning image of the hurricane.

Here is what NASA said about the image:

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of Hurricane Paula at 11:20 a.m. CDT (16:20 UTC) on October 12 while over the Caribbean Sea, just off the coasts of Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. Coiled around a distinct eye, the storm’s most intense clouds spanned roughly 200 kilometers (125 miles).

From their Earth Observatory “Image of the day”, you can download the image as a 6MB JPEG, or view it in Google Earth as an image overlay with this KMZ file.

The Image of the Day site showcases some amazing images. We’ve shown you some of them on here in the past, such as the Tempe Town Lake Drain and a cool series of images that showed the growth of Las Vegas from 1984-2009. I strongly suggest visiting the site from time to time to see what kind of great stuff they’re putting out.

Imagery of the flooding in Pakistan

August 13, 2010

UPDATE, 13-August: Google has now put out a blog entry with a lot more info from their Crisis Response team about the flooding — read it here.
A few days ago we told you that Google was seeking imagery and data for the flooding in Pakistan. While they’re still working to acquire more data, NASA has released some imagery of the country and it’s quite stunning.

You can view/download the images on the NASA Earth Observatory site. You can also view it by downloading this KML overlay

Google Earth File. You must have GE installed.

— be warned that the image is approximately 9 MB, so it’ll take a little while to load.
If you wish to offer your resources to help, Network for Good has a list of organizations that are accepting contributions, along with a description of what each organizations will do with your donation.

The Tempe Town Lake Drain

August 9, 2010

The NASA Earth Observatory captures a lot of amazing images of our planet, and their Image of the Day highlights a particularly interesting image each day.
Their most recent imagery is of Tempe Town Lake in Tempe, Arizona. On July 20, the rubberized dam on the west end of the lake ruptured and sent 977 million gallons of water down the Salt River.
The imagery they released isn’t quite as sharp as the default imagery in Google Earth, but it still shows the massive decrease in the size of Tempe Town Lake.

If you want to see it for yourself, you have a few options. First, you could simply view a jpg image of the July 28 imagery. You could also download that imagery as an image overlay (KMZ

) that I created from the July 28 imagery.
If you don’t follow it already, I highly recommend you follow NASA’s Earth Observatory Image of the Day; they show off a lot of great stuff!