22 April 2015

The Earth on Earth Day

Posted by Dan Satterfield

This is the UK on Earth Day  today in true colour from the NASA Aqua satellite in polar orbit. Click the image for a version that will knock your socks/kilt off.

This is the UK on Earth Day today in true colour from the NASA Aqua satellite in polar orbit. Click the image for a version that will knock your socks/kilt off.

I remember very well watching the CBS Evening News 45 years ago on the first Earth Day. It was a major story, and I believe Walter Cronkite led the broadcast with it. We know a lot more about our planet now than we did then, and there have been some amazing successes in protecting our environment. We now know something that was not well understood then, and that is the damage we are doing to our livable climate. We are making progress there as well, in spite of a vocal minority that refuses to accept scientific fact. There is also a lot that we still only have a basic understanding of and some of that is rather scary.

In honor of Earth Day I thought I would show you the raw full disk images from the European Meteosat and the U.S. GOES East satellite. We will have color imagery in the U.S. in about a year when GOES R launches. The new GOES-R will also have an instrument to detect lightning, and the images from it will be nearly real-time, with vastly improved IR images and resolution. The next European satellite will have an imager capable of true color images. The GOES-R images in about a year will look similar to the present European Meteosat image.

2015_4_22_1500_MSG3_16_S1_grid

Below is the GOES East:

Click either image for a larger version.

Click either image for a larger version.