The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

The use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you ...

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. This series of satellite images shows the ozone hole on the ...

Part of our team at a burned tundra site from the 2022 East Fork fire in Southwest Alaska. From left to right: Sander Veraverbeke, Max van Gerrevink, Lucas Ribeiro Diaz, Sonam Wangchuk, and Thomas ...

The 2015 fire season was the most severe ever observed by NASA Earth Observing System satellites, a new study shows. As we reported in December, 2015 was an intense fire season in Indonesia because ...

NASA satellites and sensors constantly take the pulse of our planet, measuring how Earth changes by the day, season, year, and decade. Researchers and resource managers analyze those measurements and ...

A few decades ago, the idea of predicting a disease outbreak via satellite was science fiction. But today, researchers can use environmental data to predict when and where some diseases are likely to ...

For centuries, if archaeologists wanted to find an ancient or mythical site, they trudged through desert sands or rainforest thickets armed with little more than rumors and hand-drawn maps. They ...

Sophie Nowicki bristles as she reads that statement from the IPCC to an auditorium full of scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As a scientist who builds computer models to study ice ...

Giant kelp forests are among Earth’s most productive habitats, but they are ephemeral. Researchers are using Landsat and a host of online friends to figure out where the forests are growing and ...