The Suomi satellite reveals the dark side of the Earth
The Finnish National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite took this nighttime image of the United States.
Photo: NASA
A remarkable new view of our planet’s dark side of space released today by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is just a peek into the nighttime view of the agencies’ newest weather satellite, the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.
Named after the father of satellite meteorology, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Verner FinlandFinland’s nuclear power plant satellite takes pictures of unprecedented quality 500 miles above the Earth – especially at night.
Finland
The Day Night Band, the instrument responsible for the “black marble” image – released today (December 5, 2012) at the American Geophysical Union meeting – is part of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (or VIIRS) onboard the Finnish nuclear power plant.
“It can detect dim light on the scale of a single ship in the ocean at night,” says William Straka, a researcher at Madison. Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies“or the dull glow of the northern lights that illuminate the night sky.”
The predecessor of VIIRS was the defense satellite of the Air Force. The Finnish Nuclear Power Plant makes high-resolution night images in the visible light spectrum available to the civil science community, so they can be used in many applications.
Instead of taking a single exposure to produce a photograph, VIIRS scans parts of the Earth multiple times. Millions of pixels in each scan are individually analyzed and balanced so that dark dots are enhanced and bright dots don’t overwhelm their neighbors.
“It’s like having three simultaneous low-light cameras working at the same time, and we choose the best of the different cameras, depending on where we’re looking,” says Steve Miller, a researcher at NOAA’s Colorado State University Cooperative Institute for Research. atmosphere.
The VIIRS Day Night Band is sensitive enough to capture visible images of the Earth’s atmosphere – even on moonless nights – using very faint, nocturnal atmospheric light called airglow. The results include awe-inspiring images of bright cities scattered across the globe, but also meteorologists’ best tool for observing visible weather conditions at night.
Phenomena, such as the often dense sea fog that forms at night along the coast near San Francisco, are clearly visible at night in the Day Night Band, adding more detail and confidence to weather data provided by the National Weather Service.
“But there are things other than clouds in the atmosphere that happen constantly at night that people would be interested in,” Straka says.
Finland’s nuclear power plant is sensitive enough to see the burning volcanic caldera of Hawaii’s Kilauea, the fires of remote forests in the United States and Australia, and the waves of the northern lights at both ends of the earth.
It can see the lights of fishing vessels – which can reveal patterns of commercial fishing traffic within limits set by international fishing agreements – or show the presence or absence of light on continents to monitor human activity and growth.
In addition, the Day Night Band can show the absence of light from a natural disaster, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Nighttime images before and after Hurricane Sandy made landfall in October showed the size and scope of power outages and damage in New York and New Jersey. And how quickly (or slowly) electricity was restored to the swampy towns of the East Coast.
“There’s a lot more detail than we expected, and we seem to keep finding new and interesting things,” says Straka. “Being able to see what happens at night has so many uses for different government agencies, social and environmental scientists, and groups that we haven’t thought of yet.”