Who Says Climate Models Aren’t Worth Talking About?

Here at the Earth Observatory we know as well as anybody that explaining the nuance and complexity of climate modeling isn’t easy.

In May, Nature Climate Change published a study pointing out that the number of news articles that mention climate change has been declining since 2007. There was a slight increase in mentions following the “Climategate” scandal in 2009, but the number has fallen rapidly since then (see the dashed line below).

Climate models are especially unpopular. Just a tiny fraction of the articles about climate science mention models (see the solid black line in the graph above). And, among the influential newspapers, that number is declining (see graph below).

When climate models do appear in the news, they’re often flagged as inaccurate, and political opinion outlets — rather than news outlets — account for a surprisingly large percentage of the mentions. Twice as many of the media outlets that mentioned climate models did so in a negative rather than a positive light, the study found. Political commentary outlets — The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Nation and The National Review — had the highest frequency of negative content about climate models, but a variety of other news outlets had ample negative content about models as well.

That’s surprising given the central role that modeling has played in revealing key aspects of climate science and in how the Earth works at a basic level. If you attend a scientific meeting these days, you’ll find there are few Earth science topics that don’t involve some sort of modeling. Want to know, for example, whether the plume from the huge fire burning in New Mexico is going to blow into Albuquerque? You need a model. Whether that hurricane brewing in the Gulf of Mexico will be coming to your city? You need a model. Whether there’s enough groundwater for your soybean crop to thrive? Again, you might well get your answer from a model. See the video below to see how researchers are predicting the severity of the Amazon fire season months in advance with the help of models.

Most earth science models, it’s worth noting, base their output on huge amounts of real observations; scientific modelers are not just pulling numbers from thin air. One model based at Goddard called the Modern Era Retrospective-analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA), for example, has ingested more than 50 billion satellite observations made since NASA launched the Terra satellite — and a new era of Earth observations — in 1999. Another model called GEOS-5, one of the highest-resolution models, also ingests huge amounts of data from the real world. GEOS-5 simulated the massive winter storm that struck the eastern United States in 2010 with remarkable accuracy.

Models are not just for earth science. The same sort of complex, numerical models are used all over the sciences. Alfio Quarteroni, a professor of mathematics at a university in Switzerland, laid out a few of them in an article in Notices of the Mathematical Society in 2009.

Credit: Notices of the AMS/Alfio Quarteroni

Aerospace engineers, he points out, use numerical models of fluid dynamics to make wingtips and fuselages more aerodynamic. Likewise, cardiovascular researchers take advantage of similar models to calculate how quickly blood flows through key arteries and how much stress the flow puts on artery walls as they narrow. Quarteroni has even used fluid dynamics models to try to figure out the best way to sail in different wind conditions.

Credit: Notices of the AMS/Alfio Quarteroni

Atmospheric scientists would be the first to point out that climate models aren’t always perfect. But as NASA modeler Gavin Schmidt pointed out in this Physics World article (which is worth the read if you want to understand what climate models can and can’t do), that lack of perfection doesn’t mean they’re not useful.

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The Big Picture around a Little Swamp

The Earth Observatory image of the day for June 5 shows flooding in Botswana’s Savuti River and Savuti Swamp. The abundant water turns out to be a very small part of a much bigger picture.

The Savuti Swamp sits within the Kalahari Desert, which stretches across Namibia, Angola, Zambia, South Africa, and most of Botswana. More of a sandy savannah than an actual desert, the Kalahari has wet and dry seasons that cause significant differences in vegetation. When the region is plunged into drought, an inland river delta, the Okavango, provides life-sustaining water for the wildlife. Since 2009, that water supply has been more abundant than usual, and the water has overflowed into other waterways in the region.

In 2009, the Okavango started experiencing record floods. “We first saw good flooding in Lake Ngami a few years back,” said Frank Eckardt of the University of Cape Town. “We have seen the Boteti River in flood since 2009 and also water in Lake Xau, southeast of the Okavango Delta.”

The satellite images below were acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on April 28, 2012. The first image uses a combination of visible and infrared light to better distinguish between water and land. Water is navy blue, vegetation is bright green, and bare ground is earth-toned. The imagery shows not only abundant but early water: flows have arrived in the Okavango Detla well ahead of schedule (usually July) and the delta is overflowing.

The area outlined in white above is shown in this next close-up view of the Savuti channel and swamp that was featured as our image of the day. Impressive when well-watered, the swamp is in fact just a small part of a large network of rivers and basins.

“We had in concurrence the highest flood on record in the Cuando River and the flood in the Okavango River pushing through the Selinda Channel, the first time I have seen that documented,” said Guido van Langenhove of Hydrological Services Namibia. “The combined waters then reactivated the Linyanti River, which had been drying out since 1982, to reach the overflows/backwater of the Zambezi River through the Chobe River (Lake Liambezi).” Wetter conditions were apparent in the Bukalo Channel in 2011.

Van Langenhove explains that water has also started flowing through the Savuti Channel to the Mababe Depression, a 50-by-90-kilometer (30-by-60-mile) heart-shaped basin that normally receives little water.

The skinny strip of land jutting out from Namibia eastward is known as the Caprivi Strip. The Zambezi floodplain sits at the easternmost extent of this strip, and flooding occurred in that region before 2009.

References

Burrough, S.L., Thomas, D.S.G. (2008) Late Quaternary lake-level fluctuations in the Mababe Depression: Middle Kalahari palaeolakes and the role of Zambezi inflows. Quaternary Research, 69(3), 388-403.

Okavango-Delta.net. Okavango Delta Information. Accessed June 4, 2012.

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Mollusks, corals, carbon, and volcanoes

Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. These are the major eras in the history of life on Earth, and the transition from one period to another has been marked by a major turnover in fossils — one assemblage of organisms going extinct and being replaced by another.

Today paleontologists agree that the biggest extinction in the fossil record occurred at the transition between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, about 250 million years ago. During this Permo-Triassic extinction, perhaps as much as 70 percent of the plant, reptilian, amphibian, and insect species died on land. In the ocean, the consequences were even more devastating; up to 96 percent of Earth’s marine species went extinct.

The cause of such a catastrophic loss of life has been the subject of ongoing study. One proposed explanation is an asteroid strike like the one blamed for dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. Another explanation involves the oxygen level in the ocean. Marine organisms need oxygen just as terrestrial organisms do, and some scientists have speculated that oxygen-poor water welled up from the ocean depths and suffocated marine life. Another hypothesis is large-scale volcanism. Studies published in November 2011 and May 2012 argue that volcanism does the best job of explaining all the evidence in the geologic record. And it not only explains the ancient mass extinction, but also hints at future threats to ocean life.

Although weathered by 250 million years of erosion, the Siberian Traps remain unmistakable today. Photo by Jon Ranson, NASA.

The volcanic hypothesis centers around the Siberian Traps, flat-topped volcanic mountains in Russia. The massive eruption that produced these mountains occurred 250 million years ago, about the same time as the Permo-Triassic extinction. The eruption was one of the biggest volcanic events in the last 500 million years, and it matches up with not only the timing of the extinction, but with the kinds of animals that were hit hardest.

Volcanoes release carbon dioxide, and the Siberian Traps eruptions would have emitted huge quantities of it, while also producing it indirectly. The basalts released by the eruptions flowed over sedimentary rock rich in organic material. Geologic studies of the Siberian Traps have revealed gas explosion structures along the margins of the flood basalts, which geologists have interpreted as evidence of sudden, violent carbon releases from sedimentary rocks under pressure by lava.

Besides raising atmospheric temperatures with heat-trapping gas, the newly released carbon dioxide would also have affected the ocean. Carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater to create carbonic acid, increasing ocean acidity. The carbonic acid reacts with carbonate ions, leaving less carbonate for marine life to use for shells or skeletons. Animals with such shells or skeletons suffer, but they don’t all suffer equally. Mollusks and marine arthropods have what biologists refer to as “buffered physiology,” which means they have closed circulation systems and/or gas-exchanging features (such as gills) to buffer their internal tissues from changes in ocean chemistry. Other animals such as sponges, corals, sea urchins, and sea lilies do not; their tissues are directly exposed to seawater. What the Permo-Triassic extinction studies found was that the poorly buffered organisms experienced greater rates of extinction and took longer to rebound.

Likely to be among the biggest losers in ocean chemistry changes, corals have few mechanisms to protect their internal tissues from increasing acidity. Image courtesy NOAA Ocean Explorer.

Carbon dioxide alone did not cause the catastrophic extinction 250 million years ago. Other factors, including higher temperatures and lower oxygen levels in the water, also pressured marine life. But carbon dioxide likely played an outsized role.

No one can predict when volcanic activity as widespread and destructive and the Siberian Traps eruptions might occur again. But we do know that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere pose a threat to marine life today. While volcanoes currently release 130 to 380 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, human burning of fossil fuels releases about 30 billion tons of it. That’s anywhere from 100 to 300 times as much greenhouse gas that can increase ocean acidity.

Today’s ocean contains a sizable reservoir of fine-grained calcium carbonate sediment that acts as a counterweight to rising ocean acidity. Geologists surmise that such a reservoir probably didn’t exist in the Permo-Triassic ocean. Moreover, today’s marine organisms descended from the survivors of high acidity episodes over the last 250 million years, so they may be better able to withstand ocean chemistry changes. Nevertheless, rising ocean acidity could spell trouble for marine organisms such as corals. A 2011 study of volcanic carbon dioxide seeps in Papua New Guinea found that ocean acidification and temperature stress reduced coral diversity and abundance. As before, poorly buffered marine life could suffer.

For more information on carbon dioxide and ocean acidification, please see the Earth Observatory features The Carbon Cycle and The Ocean’s Carbon Balance.

References

Clapham, M.E., Payne, J.L. (2011) Acidification, anoxia, and extinction: A multiple logistic regression analysis of extinction selectivity during the Middle and Late Permian. Geology. 39(11), 1059-1062.

Fabricius, K. E., Langdon, C., Uthicke, S. Humphrey, C. Noonan, S., De’ath, G. Okazaki, R. Muehllehner, N. Glas, M.S., Lough, J.M. (2011) Losers and winners in coral reefs acclimatized to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations. Nature Climate Change. 1, 165-169.

Kerr, R.A. (1997) Life’s winners keep their poise in tough times. Science. 278(5342), 1403.

Mitchell, A. (2012, April 30) Life in the sea found its fate in a paroxysm of extinction. The New York Times.

Payne, J.L., Clapham, M.E. (2012) End-Permian mass extinction in the oceans: an ancient analog for the twenty-first century? Earth and Planetary Sciences. 40, 89-111.

PBS Evolution. (2001) Permian-Triassic extinction.

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Make a Movie, See a Launch

In case you missed it, NASA is sponsoring a video contest starring your home planet. The winner will receive behind-the-scenes access to the launch of NASA’s next major Earth-observing satellite — the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) — from Vandenberg Air Force Base in January 2013.

Most of the public tends to focus on NASA’s role in planetary science, astrophysics, solar science, astronomy, and space flight. But as Earth Observatory readers know, we also have huge role in studying the one planet that is most important to us all. This contest is a chance to show how and why we should study our planet from space, and what that view means to you. The theme of your video should be: “The Home Frontier.”

We would love to see some entries from EO readers. If you dig around in our archives, you will find more than 11,000 Earth photos, maps, animations, and data visualizations to work with. Just about all of them are in the public domain and free to use in your creations.

For all of the rules and guidelines, visit this page. The contest ends on May 31, 2012. As we all know, nothing motivates quite like a quick deadline…

P.S. — For some inspiration, here is the video that won last year’s contest:

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Question from Facebook: What Controls the Thickness of a Storm’s Dust?

We recently posted an image of a dust storm in the Middle East (see below) that prompted one of our Facebook followers to ask why the dust is thicker near the left part of the image than the right. He wondered if the layer of dust is usually thickest near the origin of dust storms.

I contacted Ralph Kahn, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard who specializes in studying dust and other types of aerosols for an answer. Kahn quickly emailed back with a detailed explanation. At the end of his note, he even managed to toss in a reference to dust storms on Mars. Kahn’s full note (in italics and with imagery added) is below.

“The thickness of dust in the atmosphere depends on several factors. In simple situations, there are discrete sources, and a wind that blows steadily in one direction. In this case, you get a relatively thick plume near-source that eventually thins and dissipates downwind, as the plume broadens, and as some of the dust settles out of the atmosphere. An example of this on the Earth Observatory is here (see the image below).

It is slightly more complex when the source is an extended area, and the wind still blows steadily in one direction. In this case, you can get a relatively thick plume near-source that again thins and dissipates downwind, but not so uniformly. Examples of this on the Earth Observatory are here, here, and here (see the three images below).

Here there is structure in the plumes, as there are multiple sources within the source regions whose plumes tend to merge, and some are more productive than others, which could be due to differences in the surface and/or in the near-surface wind. Moving downwind, there is some structure in the wind as well, most likely due to wind shear (different wind speeds at different elevations).

Dust storm in New Mexico. Image from the Crew Earth Observations Office. Click on it for more details.

Dust storm in the Saharan Desert. Image acquired by MODIS. Click on it for more details.

Combining multiple sources, changes in the near-surface wind speed and direction at some sources over time, differences in the speed or direction of the wind carrying the dust after it is lifted (which can occur at different *elevations* as well as different horizontal locations) and different rates of settling, any number of patterns can arise. (Note: Kahn gave us five examples, but I only included these two.  You can view the other three here, here, and here.)

Dust storm in Afghanistan. Image acquired by MODIS. Click on it for more details.

And sometimes dust heats up in the atmosphere, and actually convects, creating cumulus-like plumes. This is common on Mars, but can also occur on Earth.

Dust storm in Kazakhstan. Image from the International Space Station. Click on it for more details.

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Checking in and checking out of spring break

The past few weeks have been rough on Earth-observing satellites. (The past decade hasn’t been great either.) But there was some good news and some engineering prowess to go along with the troubles.

On April 8, 2012, the European Space Agency’s Envisat suffered a permanent loss of communications for reasons that engineers have been unable to figure out so far. The failure came just a few weeks after the satellite celebrated its 10th anniversary.

The Thematic Mapper — the primary natural-color imager on America’s venerable Landsat 5 satellite — officially ended regular operations on May 8, following several months of operator attempts to revive it. TM collected images for 27 years, and several hundred of them are part of our Earth Observatory archives. Landsat controllers are happy, however, to be collecting data once again from the Multispectral Scanner (MSS) on Landsat 5, an instrument that had not worked for nearly a decade. The next generation of Landsat is scheduled for launch in 2013.

NASA’s Earth Observer 1 (EO-1) satellite also broke off regular operations and went into a “safe mode” in April. But in that case, there is happier news.

EO-1 halted operations after experiencing a low battery charge. Like almost all satellites in earth orbit, EO-1 uses solar panels to generate electricity for its systems and to charge its batteries for orbits on the night side of Earth. Think of it like a mobile telephone that runs until the battery is low and then needs to be recharged. Except EO-1 gets drained and recharged and drained 14 times a day. Every day for the past decade.

The satellite also gets bombarded by space radiation, particularly while passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly, where electrically charged particles trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field graze deeper into the atmosphere than in other spots. The satellite also endures cycles of heating in direct sunlight and freezing in the shade…over and over again.

Low-Earth orbiting satellites like EO-1 are built to endure these cycles of charge and discharge, hot and cold, light and dark, radiation bombardment and calm vacuums. But it’s always a little amazing to think about how many variables those satellites are designed to survive.

After a few weeks of sleepless nights and long days, the NASA team was able to coax EO-1 back into operations by resetting everything on the satellite and reloading all of the flight and operations software. Think of it like reseting your computer by unplugging it and turning it back on. Granted, it’s a lot more complicated, and mission engineers had to be very sure they understood why the problem happened so it didn’t happen again right after the reset.

EO-1 has been back in operations for several weeks since its two week spring break. The “first/return to light” image above shows Christchurch, New Zealand, as viewed by the Advanced Land Imager (which was actually designed to test technologies for the next generation of Landsats). The satellite appears to be back in good health, but you can read more about the anomaly on the EO-1 satellite page. (Look for the document “EO-1 Safehold Anomaly 2012:097:23:59 2012:111:23:59″ near the bottom of the page. If that seems cryptic, it’s an indication of the time of the anomaly: just shy of midnight on day 97 of 2012 (April 6) to day 111 (April 20)).

Tags: ALI, EO-1, satellite operations
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The EO on iPad and a Quilt

We often see our images and stories pop up in different places. Obviously we see Earth Observatory content showing up  on other web-based science and news media or on television. But you might see our images in other places, too.

This past week a new iPhone/iPad app called Xweather was launched in the iTunes store. This app takes advantage of our Natural Hazards RSS feed to highlight event imagery around the Earth.

And a few weeks back, my wife and I were browsing through a fabric store when a particular pattern caught our eye: the Blue Marble (2000) on a quilt! This pattern is by Emily Cier of Carolina Patchworks.

Where have you seen images and stories from the Earth Observatory? Other apps? Posters? Uses in books? Hot air balloons?  The Blue Marble gets quite a bit of use in advertising and other places (a quick search of Flickr provides several examples). Let us know what else you find…or what else you do with it yourselves.

Tags: apps, Blue Marble
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Happy birthday, Athanasius Kircher

By the year 1631, residents of southern Italy had perhaps grown complacent about the volcano that destroyed Pompeii. But near the end of that year, Mount Vesuvius reminded them of its power. From December 1631 to January 1632, explosive activity at Vesuvius caused a caldera collapse, a tsunami, mud flows, scorched farms, and up to 4,000 deaths. It was the volcano’s most destructive eruption since 79 AD.

The volcano was still rumbling several years later when it received a distinguished visitor: Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit mathematician and linguist living in Rome. Unlike his sensible contemporaries, he didn’t admire the volcano from a respectable distance. He descended into the active crater.

I reached Portici, the town at the roots of the mountain, and from there was led by a trusty peasant who knew the way, paying him a handsome fee. In the middle of the night I climbed the mountain by hard and rugged paths. When I reached the crater, horrible to relate, I saw it all lit up by fire, with an intolerable exhalation of sulfur and burning bitumen. Thunderstruck by the unheard-of spectacle, I believed I was peering into the realm of the dead, and seeing the horrid phantasms of demons, no less, perceived the groaning and shaking of the dreadful mountain, the inexplicable stench, the dark smoke mixed with globes of fire which the bottom and sides of the mountain continuously vomited forth from eleven different places, forcing me at times to vomit out myself . . . When dawn broke, I decided to explore diligently the whole of the interior constitution of the mountain. I chose a safe place where a firm foothold might be had, and descended to a vast rock with a flat surface to which the mountain slope gave access. There I set up my Pantometer and measured the dimensions of the mountain.

It was a bigger risk than most people would take, but by the time Kircher descended into the rumbling crater of Vesuvius, he had survived a shipwreck, gangrene, trampling by horses, a trip through the grinding wheel of a mill, and a near execution by Protestant soldiers in the Thirty Years War. So maybe a mere volcano didn’t intimidate him.

Kircher's engraving of Vesuvius in Mundus Subterraneus. Now appears in Athanasius Kircher's Theater of the World by Joscelyn Godwin.

He visited and studied Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli, and between 1664 and 1678 he published his observations in Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World). In his twelve volumes, Kircher suggested that volcanoes owed their heat to the combustion of sulfur, bitumen, and niter (a chemical composition similar to gunpowder). His assumption was understandable considering volcanic eruptions release gases, including the sulfur that nauseated him at Vesuvius. He also realized that the amount of molten material released by a volcano often exceeded what the volcano itself could contain. He surmised that volcanoes were vents for material deep within the planet’s interior. Furthermore, he realized that volcanic activity could destroy some mountains while building others.

Kircher produced a diagram of the Earth’s interior to illustrate his hypothesis. Although quite different from geologists’ current understanding of our planet’s core, his hypothesis of a central source of heat inside the planet, and his realization that volcanoes and earthquakes are a global phenomenon, are now widely accepted.

Kircher's diagram of the Earth. Image courtesy Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology

Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus also discussed fossils. In Kircher’s day, naturalists had not yet figured out how fossils formed, and explanations varied from a creative force in the planet to the handiwork of angels. Kircher didn’t have a modern paleontologist’s understanding, but he did interpret some fossils correctly. And while some of his contemporaries attributed big skulls and femurs to giants, he wondered where the giants could find enough room to live and meat to eat. (The bones are now recognized as the remains of mammoths and mastodons.)

Kircher was a polymath who published on many topics besides Earth science, and his Mundus Subterraneus was a curious mixture of good science and weird old lore, including topics such as mining, gravity, magnetism, the Sun, the Moon, weather, bioluminescence, fireworks, herbal remedies, poisons, antidotes, astrology, demons, dragons, and subterranean men. Chased out of his native Germany by the violence of the Thirty Years War, he settled briefly in France before being summoned to Rome to teach mathematics and interpret Egyptian hieroglyphs. In fact, Kircher was summoned to Rome in the wake of the condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Church authorities wanted a showman who could rival’s Galileo’s talent and wit.

Kircher wasn’t ahead of his time in every respect. A believer in spontaneous generation of life forms, Kircher published recipes. Perhaps more remarkably, he believed in dragons, at least when they were vouched for by an authority (particularly a pope). In fact, in the words of one science historian, “Kircher was perhaps the last naturalist to believe passionately in the reality of any papal dragon he saw.” Dragons were featured in Mundus Subterraneus alongside astute observations about volcanoes and fossils.

One of Kircher's dragon engravings. Now appears in Athanasius Kircher's Theater of the World by Joscelyn Godwin.

How could the same person who made correct observations about Earth sciences still believe in dragons? For starters, it was politically shrewd to believe in the things your patrons believed in, including the occasional mythological creature. And it’s important to remember the age in which Kircher lived. Even in the seventeenth century, belief in supernatural beings was fairly common, and the religious and political uncertainty of the times fueled outlandish rumors of monsters, bad omens, and witches. When the mother of the great astronomer Johannes Kepler was put on trial for witchcraft, Kepler rushed to her defense and assured the authorities she wasn’t a witch. But he didn’t argue that there was no such thing as a witch.

History hasn’t remembered Kircher as generously as Galileo or Kepler, but the Jesuit is worth remembering. Kircher was born on May 2, the feast day of St. Athanasius. While he remembered the date of his birth, he wasn’t so sure about the year: 1601 or 1602. So May 2, 2012, marks Kircher’s 410th or 411th birthday.

Further reading

Findlen, P. ed. (2004) Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge.

Godwin, J. (2009) Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World. Rochester: Inner Traditions.

Harrington, R. (2009, June 13) Athanasius Kircher’s “Mundus Subterraneus” (1664). The Volcanism Blog. Accessed April 21, 2012.

Principe, L.M. (2011). The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rowland, I.D. (2000) The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Library.

Rudwick, M.J.S. (1976) The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Smith, P.H., Findlen, P. eds. (2002) Merchants and Marvels. New York: Routledge.

Yamada, T. (2006)  Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works. Geological Society of America Special Papers.

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Share and Share Alike

The vast majority of content on the Earth Observatory is free and available for anyone to use, commercially or otherwise. Many iPhone users will recognize our Blue Marble image from their welcome screen, and many other people have been using our RSS feeds and other syndication methods to bring EO content to other websites, or to integrate into their Google homepage or Facebook feed.

Recently, we learned about a widget created for WordPress that will show our Image of the Day in your blog’s sidebar. We are always excited to see our content repurposed, and this is a really cool way for people to share compelling images and stories with their family, friends, and community.

Do you know of other places where EO content is being used? Are you a fellow developer interested in how you can use our content in your own web applications? Leave us a note here telling us where you have seen our content, or what you would do with with the resources available. Are you working on a great app, but don’t have exactly what you need? Tell us what you’re looking for! We are always looking for new ways to get our readership involved in making the Earth Observatory even better.

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Taking Science to the People: Climate Forum in Maryland

Ernie Hilsenrath spent more than 40 years working for NASA, and though he officially retired a few years ago, he is still a great advocate for his employer and for science. The longtime atmospheric chemist is both amazed and troubled by how few people know that NASA works in Earth science. He is equally troubled by all of the misinformation and misunderstanding in the public discourse about our planet.

“I have met many educated people who did not know that NASA runs Earth-observing missions,” said Hilsenrath, who served as deputy project scientist and program scientist for the Aura satellite mission. “They know about going to the Moon and Hubble and astronauts and Mars rovers. But many don’t know that NASA is out there watching this planet, gathering important data about Earth systems and the quality of our environment.”

He decided to do something about it. Working with his nearby county college, local civic groups in Maryland, and several NASA colleagues, Hilsenrath has organized two public science events for this week. During “Observations from Space: Earth and Climate Change,” NASA scientists will present the latest data and images from Earth-observing satellites and then have an interactive discussion about climate change.

The first event will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21, and it will be geared toward students from Howard Community College and local high schools. The second forum is open to the public and will be held from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, March 24. Both free events will be held at Howard Community College, which is sponsoring the event along with the Climate Change Initiative of Howard County, Howard County’s Office of Environmental Sustainability, and NASA.

“In recent years, people have drifted away from seeing our environment and climate as a priority,” Hilsenrath noted. “I would like to raise some awareness and nudge people back to caring about it. There are some uncertainties and unknowns, but there is a lot more convincing data — non-partisan data — about real and measurable changes.”

If you cannot make it in person, both events will be shown via webcast. Visit http://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/20120321hcc.html for more information.

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