|
|
ATM S
211: Winter 2007
Climate and Climate Change
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2007Q1/211
|
All six images are from NASA's Visible
Earth site.
|
This image shows the temperature of the water in the Atlantic Ocean off the US
East Coast from the Carolinas north to southern Maine on 2 May 2001. The white
(coldest) areas are where clouds are hiding the ocean surface. The red and
orange areas are the warm Gulf Stream waters. The warm swirls are eddies,
similar to weather patterns in the ocean. The temperatures were measured by
the satellite instrument MODIS, which can measure the amount of infrared
light emitted by the Earth's surface to space and, from this, estimate the
surface temperature.
|
An intense North Pacific storm approaching the British Columbia and Northwest
coast on 27 October 2000. The tight spiral is the center of the storm, and the
thick clouds along the Washington coast are part of a cold front that is ahead
of the storm. Storms like this can bring Seattle heavy rain and strong wind,
most often in the autumn months. This storm came ashore too far north to have a
major impact in Seattle, but it did bring winds of over 70 miles per hour to the
Queen Charlotte Islands (northeast of the storm's center in this image).
|
An image from the satellite instrument Landsat of the edge of a section of the
Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica on 21 February 2000. It shows many icebergs that
have broken off of the ice shelf and areas of melting and cracking on the ice
shelf. The bottom image is an enlargement of the area inside the box in the top
image. Ice shelves form when continental ice sheets reach the edge of the
continent and begin to float on the ocean; they can be several hundred meters
thick and are thought to reduce the speed at which the ice sheet flows into the
ocean. Two years later this entire ice shelf, an area about the size of Rhode
Island, completely disintegrated. It had been stable for 10,000 years before its
collapse.
|
This photograph of the Earth was taken on 7 December 1972 by a member of the crew
of Apollo 17. They were about 28,000 miles from Earth, on their way to the moon,
when the photo was taken. Because the sun was directly behind the photographer,
the photo shows the entire sunlit portion of the Earth, something rarely seen
from satellites. Africa is the main landmass visible, with the Mediterranean
Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Peninsula, and Persian Gulf all visible near the top of the
image. The Southern Ocean, one of the stormiest areas of the planet, is mostly
hidden by clouds. Antarctica is visible at the bottom, but is difficult to
distinguish from the clouds.
|
These images show the Antarctic ozone hole in September and October 2000. The
measurements were made by the satellite instrument TOMS, and show the total amount
of ozone above each point on the surface. Most of the ozone is in the
stratosphere, more than 10 kilometers above the surface. The greenish colors
represent areas with normal amounts of ozone, around 300 Dobson Units (DU, a
strange unit--1 DU represents an amount of Ozone that, if brought to sea level
and room temperature, would have a thickness of 0.01 mm, so 300 DU would have a
thickness of 3 mm, about 0.12 inches; you can also think of it as a unit of mass).
The areas in dark blue, with ozone amounts less than 220 DU, show the extent of the
ozone hole. The ozone hole forms every spring (August and September) over
Antarctica when the return of the sun, combined with temperatures in the
stratosphere below -85°C (-121°F) and man-made gases from refrigerants and
propellants, cause the chemical destruction of the ozone. As the sun warms the
air, the reaction stops and the ozone recovers in October and November.
|
This image, made with data from the SeaWiFS instrument on a NASA satellite, shows
the amount of plant activity on the planet. Over the oceans the colors represent
the chlorophyll concentration; areas with low concentrations (purple and blue
areas) have very little plant life, while areas with high concentrations (orange
and red areas) have abundant plant life. Over land the colors indicate the
amount of vegetation; brown areas have very little or no vegetation, while dark
green areas have large amounts of vegetation. Since nearly all ecosystems have
food chains that begin with the capture of solar energy by plants, the amount of
plant activity in an area is directly related to how much life that area can
support.
|
