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Land Surface Temperature Anomaly

Land surface temperature is how hot the “surface” of the Earth would feel to the touch in a particular location. From a satellite’s point of view, the “surface” is whatever it sees when it looks through the atmosphere to the ground. It could be snow and ice, the grass on a lawn, or the roof of a building. These maps compare daytime land surface temperatures in a particular month to the average temperatures for that month from 2000-2008. Places that were warmer than average are red, places that were near normal are white, and places that were cooler than average are blue. The observations were collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

Aerosol Size

Earth’s atmosphere contains tiny liquid and solid particles called aerosols. Natural aerosol particles, such as dust and sea salt, tend to be larger than human-produced aerosols, such as particle pollution from burning fossil fuels. These aerosol size maps are based on data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Green areas show where the aerosols that were present were mostly larger particles. Red areas show where aerosols consisted mostly of small particles. Yellow areas show plumes with an even mix of small and large particles. Gray shows where the sensor did not collect data.

View, download, or analyze more of these data from NASA Earth Observations (NEO):

Land Surface Temperature Anomaly

Aerosol Size