This natural color image of Sandy Neck and Barnstable Harbor, on the north side of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was acquired on November 4, 2005, by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s EO-1 satellite.
For several weeks in May and early June, daily satellite images of the North Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland have captured partial glimpses of luxuriant blooms of microscopic marine plants between patches of clouds. On June 4, 2007, the skies over the ocean cleared, displaying the sea’s spring bloom in brilliant color. A bright blue bloom stretches north from the Mouth of the River Shannon and tapers off like a plume of blue smoke north of Clare Island.
A Korean satellite provides an hourly view of the phytoplankton in the ocean, while also offering a testbed for future ocean-observing satellite missions.
Fall storms often hinder ecological research in the vicinity of the North Atlantic, but in 2015, scientists made observations from ship, aircraft, and satellite.