Maybe you have heard people call Earth “the water planet.” The nickname is well-deserved. As this mosaic of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite ...

At a weekend science camp in the remote village of Bautista, Philippines, the faces of students at Coloscaoyan National High School quickly changed from skepticism to excitement when they realized ...

Examine the set of graphs below for a given city. Read carefully the temperature and precipitation scales on the graphs. Review the biome information. Two biome choices are given for each set of ...

Since its launch in February 2013, Landsat 8 has collected about 400 scenes of the Earth’s surface per day. Each of these scenes covers an area of about 185 by 185 kilometers (115 by 115 miles)—34,200 ...

On September 16, 2012, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) issued a ...

Agencies and scientists across the globe continue to use Landsat data to monitor deforestation and to enforce environmental policies. For example, in 2003, the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, piloted a ...

In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was ...

Although it became clear about 40 years ago that aerosols could affect climate, the measurements needed to establish the magnitude of such effects—or even whether specific aerosol types warm or cool ...

All of this extra carbon needs to go somewhere. So far, land plants and the ocean have taken up about 55 percent of the extra carbon people have put into the atmosphere while about 45 percent has ...

Sea surface temperatures have a large influence on climate and weather. For example, every 3 to 7 years a wide swath of the Pacific Ocean along the equator warms by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. This ...

Review the biomes. Now examine the set of temperature and precipitation graphs given below for each city. Be careful reading the scales on the graphs. Using the pull-down menus, select the correct ...

As green chlorophyll fades from trees and plants each autumn, other pigments color Earth’s landscapes. Satellites take leaf-peeping to a whole new level.