Topic
Earth-observation satellites and sensors, such as radar and optical imagers, used to monitor ice, water, vegetation, and other surface changes globally.
A WHOI-led team tested marine ice-cliff instability against 15,330 satellite observations and reports limits to rapid retreat in Science. The data set gives modelers a global test for a mechanism that has never been directly observed.
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Stanford researchers report in Nature that dedicated methane satellites detected 92% to 100% of test plumes in 481 releases at one Arizona site. The rates apply to clear days at a desert site, and most size estimates were off by up to 50%.
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Satellite data put many of 590 mapped peatlands in Austria, Germany and Switzerland below their official map size, researchers report. They link the gap to drainage ditches, paths and encroaching scrub seen in aerial photographs, and say restoration planning needs current data.
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NASA and NSIDC say Antarctic sea ice likely peaked on September 14 at 17.59 million square kilometers, the third-lowest maximum on record. Ice has mostly stayed below normal since 2016, and NASA says scientists will keep watching to see if that is a long-term change or a statistical fluctuation.
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Global fire incidents fell 12.3% in the first half of 2020 as lockdowns kept people home, a study in Cell Reports Sustainability finds. Its authors take the countries that burned more as evidence that people put fires out as well as start them.
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Columbia researchers found aerosol pollution rose about 33% across 46 cities after U.S. embassies stopped publishing air-quality readings in 2025. The result is evidence that public monitoring data helps hold pollution down, though the published summary does not say whose behavior changed.
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Colin Gleason's team used NASA's SWOT satellite to check machine-learning river models and found serious errors in under 10% of reaches. Those errors cluster on dammed, arid and Arctic rivers, among the reaches that matter most for water resources.
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NC State satellite mapping shows North Carolina lost 21% of its coastal forest, about 64,220 hectares, between 1985 and 2021, mostly to rising seas. Measured per year, conversion to marsh, ghost forest and shrub after 2010 ran at about triple the earlier pace.
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Researchers using 38 years of satellite data found wetland inundation tracked yearly runoff more closely than climate in 69% of 109 Prairie Pothole catchments. The finding is a correlation, and how much wetland data would sharpen streamflow forecasts has yet to be shown.
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Chongzhao Zhang's team fed raw satellite radiance directly into aerosol simulations and cut prediction errors by about 50% in tests over China. A pretrained AI step makes the approach affordable, though the test scored aerosols against satellite data and left any forecast gains unmeasured.
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Eos's Landslide Blog compared Planet Labs images from 12 and 25 August and found little change on the Langtang Lirung slope that collapsed on 26 August. The few changes it found are hard to tell from background activity, a problem for optical warning systems that would rely on such imagery.
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University of Washington researchers say NASA's SWOT satellite can measure water levels on more than 85% of 800,000 km of Asian irrigation canals. The mission was never designed for canals, so the map points to monitoring from hardware already in orbit, with its scores checked against US canal measurements.
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The August berg was the largest Arctic calving since 2020, but it broke along a fracture the team watching Petermann had not expected, leaving two rifts that together outline more than twice the area that left.
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University of Arizona researchers find about 80% of the world's drylands swinging harder between wet and dry years across four decades of satellite data. Forecasts for rain-fed farms and rangelands built on the 13 vegetation models they tested assume steadier plants than the satellite record shows.
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Dartmouth and Appalachian Mountain Club researchers found significant vegetation gains in 69% of alpine zones between the Adirondacks and the Gaspe. The growth runs fastest on wind-sheltered slopes, where ground surveys will have to settle whether rare flowering plants are losing out.
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Sentinel-2 images show Sertung Island's vegetation index falling from 0.72 to about zero in the month spanning the September 2026 Anak Krakatau eruption. The researchers say ash over living plants gives the same signal, so survivors must be counted on the ground.
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CIRES scientists measured a Petermann Ice Shelf river cutting below sea level to form an estuary that came and went from 2014 to 2018. A co-author suspects that cycle weakened the shelf ahead of its Manhattan-sized calving in August, though the imagery ends eight years earlier.
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Calibrating penguin guano color against guano chemistry gave one team a krill-share model they could run backwards through an archive that starts in the 1980s. It is cheap, it covers a whole continent, and it is correlational about krill, the number everyone wants pinned down.
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The archive that pushed Smyley Island's founding back to at least 1989 also shows the colony re-forming beside grounded icebergs after a probable total failure in 2022. That re-forming pattern is awkward for projections that hold breeding sites still.
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The first large-scale US analysis of smoke-rain events finds that a handful of days can dominate a year's nutrient delivery to downwind soils and water.
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