Topic
Use of orbiting satellites and sensors—lidar, multispectral imagers, aerosol cameras—to monitor Earth's atmosphere, land, ice, and surface conditions.
Hurricane Simon passed about 50 km off Mexico's Pacific coast on Oct. 11 as a Category 4 storm with winds near 210 km/h, NASA reported. The Sierra Madre appeared to shrink its wind field, while news reports described flooding in Manzanillo.
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NASA's Black Marble HD imagery shows nighttime lights falling west of Isaias's eye after the storm came ashore near Destin with 105 mph winds. Lights are a proxy for electric service, so the images suggest where power was disrupted.
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Arctic sea ice hit its 2026 minimum on September 12 at about 4.6 million square kilometers, tied for 10th lowest on record. NASA Earth Observatory says the remaining ice is thinner and younger, and scientists still warn of a nearly ice-free summer before 2050.
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NASA's Landsat images show farmland and aquaculture along Prachin Buri's Bang Pakong River flooded on 2 October 2026, set against the same season in 2025. The pair is strong evidence of how far the water spread that day and weaker evidence of what caused it.
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Lacy Cotter-Vardeman says roughly 90% of her Lubbock County dryland cotton died in the 2026 drought. So far, her farm is the only evidence that this was a new kind of loss, worse than the crop abandonment of 2011 and 2022.
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Landsat 9 imaged the Moose, Nottaway and Harricanaw rivers carrying tea-colored water into James Bay's southern bays on September 27, 2026. The stain is dissolved organic matter from boreal bog and forest. NASA's account gives no estimate of the carbon it carries.
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Australia's Darwin ash-advisory centre used ESA's EarthCARE lidar to confirm that Anak Krakatau's westward plume sat near 15 km, as forecast. That check brought a satellite built to study clouds and Earth's energy balance into aviation advice in near-real time.
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Geoscience Australia's public Sentinel-2 tool maps vegetation moisture at 20-metre resolution about every five days. In the ACT, rated normal risk by the national outlook, it showed a dry south and faster drying than in most recent years.
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Passenger estimates for the two-day closure run above 300,000. The 1883 eruption that built this volcano killed about 35,000, almost all by tsunami, and that mechanism needs the edifice to collapse rather than the plume to climb.
Perspective Coverage
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The IMBIE team merged 42 independent satellite surveys from 27 missions to account for 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 1979, and it assigns 84% of that loss to glaciers accelerating into the ocean.
Perspective Coverage
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Lake Powell's surface read 3,517.24 feet on September 10, the lowest on record, after the Upper Colorado Basin's 2025-2026 snowpack came in thin and record warmth took more of it before the melt reached the river.
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An ESA-led team pooled 45 surveys from 27 satellites to weigh Greenland and Antarctica back to the 1970s. It finds 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice gone since 1979, five-sixths of it to water working from below.
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A small, routinely active volcano between Java and Sumatra produced a day of explosive eruption whose effects on flying and on air quality took several days to clear, and the flight tally in circulation comes from news reports.
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A Peking University-led team matched US forest inventories to satellite productivity and found that heat and moisture extremes arriving together hurt more than either alone, with species-rich plots dipping less and recovering faster.
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Puerto Rico held no drought at all three months before August 25, when the U.S. Drought Monitor put 44 percent of the territory in extreme drought and rationing was already running in several municipalities.
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By September 3 the Northeast Pacific had 15 named storms and six hurricanes against the Atlantic's five and none, the split forecasters called back in spring. A basin tally, though, says nothing about where the rain lands.
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A University of Tokyo-led team fed satellite isotope ratios into a weather model and got better winds, temperature and humidity out of it, which is the first evidence that a long-theorized upgrade pays off in a setup close to how forecasters actually run.
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Cities that write emission plans alone are, on this evidence, optimising a number that is partly set elsewhere. The size of that outside share is modelled rather than measured, which changes what a mayor can do with it.
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A Sentinel-1 radar pass caught the Aug. 4 break at Greenland's Petermann Glacier a day early. The two rifts still holding cover about 2.3 times the area that just left.
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A PNAS study finds parts of the Sacramento Valley collapsed during the 2020-2022 drought and have not rebounded, which undercuts the idea that wet years always restore what dry years remove.
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