Sure, space may be silent, or at least absent the sound waves that human ears can hear. But put that aside for a moment, and try to imagine the sound of a satellite orbiting hundreds of miles above ...

Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits ...

In the process of researching a feature for the Earth Observatory, I always come across fascinating tidbits that just don’t quite fit into my article. For instance, there’s this great carbon ...

This blog post is the first in a series to come. Our team, the Climate & Ecosystems Change research group from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is working in collaboration with the Environmental ...

This month we published a satellite image and map of the southern United States featuring the Black Belt Prairie—a crescent-shaped swath of land running through Mississippi and Alabama named for its ...

The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

Even after the monsoon rains subsided, waters retreated much more slowly than they had advanced. Months after the rains stopped, crops, homes, businesses, and entire towns were still submerged. In ...

We are kicking off 2025 with much to look forward to but also much to look back on. In 2024, over 7.5 million readers visited our website to read our stories, and many millions more viewed our imagery ...

The ozone hole and global warming are not the same thing, and neither is the main cause of the other. The ozone hole is an area in the stratosphere above Antarctica where chlorine and bromine gases ...

Earth scientists will move a step closer to a full understanding of the Sun's energy output with the launch of the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. SORCE will be equipped with ...

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Five decades later, the signs of air pollution are much clearer. Dozens of satellites now orbit Earth, and some of them collect information about polluting particles and gases. “In comparison to those ...