28 February 2013
The Oceans Like You Have Never Seen Them Before
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Here is what NASA had to say about this video-
This video provides a global tour of sea surface salinity using measurements taken by NASA’s Aquarius instrument aboard the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft, from December 2011 through December 2012. Red represents areas of high salinity, while blue represents areas of low salinity. Aquarius is a focused effort to measure sea surface salinity and will provide the global view of salinity variability needed for climate studies. The mission is a collaboration between NASA and the Space Agency of Argentina (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales).
Hat tip to my friend Joe Witte at NASA Goddard for this.
I found it rather surprising how far the Amazon freshwater plume travels. It also appears to pulse so that’s probably the impact from the rainy season, I imagine. Pretty cool.
I agree!
Great Video.
I actually think that the pulse of fresh water moving eastward from the Amazon is probably a Kelvin wave propagating along the equatorial counter-current.
This really demonstrates the power of video when trying to understand Earth processes. It is much easier to understand that these are dynamic when you can watch them change.