NOAA’s new weather satellite is up and running, and its images of Earth are stunning
You’d have to be in some kind of comatose sense of wonder to not appreciate satellite images of Earth. If you are, images from NOAA’s latest satellite might snap you out of it.
And those are just a taste of the fascinating images it has to offer.
NOAA-21 is a polar orbiting satellite that was launched on November 10, 2022. It orbits the Earth about 14 times a day and images the entire Earth twice a day. It is another of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s latest generation of polar, non-geosynchronous environmental satellites. It’s called a name Common Polar satellite system (JPSS.) Their mission is to provide global satellite data for weather forecasting and climate change models. NOAA operates a third pole-orbiting satellite called Suomi NPP.
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If you’re an Earth junkie like some of us at Universe Today, you’ve already seen pictures of these satellites. The images are used to monitor all kinds of things: dust storms, forest fires, algal blooms, ice sheets, volcanic eruptions, heat waves, huge storms with lightning, and much more.
Two areas in particular are visible in these initial images. One shows bright blue water in the Caribbean Sea, the other smog in northern India.
“The turquoise color seen around Cuba and the Bahamas in the lower left image comes from sediment in the shallow waters around the continental shelf,” said NOAA’s Dr. Satya Kalluri, a scientist with the Joint Polar Satellite System program. The sediment around continental shelves is called neritic sediment. Wind, rivers, flowing ice and other processes transport it from the land to the ocean. (Obviously, not on the ice in the Caribbean. Don’t email me.)
Scientists are interested in these sediments because they can analyze things like carbonates and isotopes in them to help model global and environmental change. While we’re used to seeing only optical photographs, including the sediment and the blue waters they spawn, other instruments on satellites, such as microwave and infrared probes, provide deeper scientific information. This information helps scientists understand other features of the ocean, such as floods, river flooding, and even harmful algal blooms that can kill shellfish and poison people.
The image showing smog in India also sheds light on some of the dynamics of this large and densely populated country.
North India collides with the Himalayas. The Himalayas are vast and contain some of the highest mountains on Earth, including Mt. Everest. The region controls the geography of the region.
The Himalayas separate Indogangetic plain, a vast fertile region in the Indian subcontinent, from the Tibetan Plateau. The mountain range causes massive rainfall in the plains directly south of it during the monsoons. The abundant glaciers of the Himalayas provide reliable, year-round water for agriculture. As a result, most of India’s agriculture is concentrated here, along with more than 400 million of its population. It is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.
But as the picture shows, the Himalayas also have smog concentrated here, right where so many people live. A satellite image shows how the smog is a health hazard for hundreds of millions of people in the country’s critical agricultural region.
“VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) serves so many disciplines that it is an absolutely critical measurement suite,” said Dr. James Gleason, NASA’s JPSS Flight Project Scientist. “VIIRS provides many different data products used by scientists in related fields, from agricultural economists trying to make crop forecasts, to air quality scientists predicting where wildfire smoke will come, to disaster relief teams calculating night lights to understand a disaster.”
NOAA now has three polar-orbiting earth-observing satellites carrying VIIRS. That redundancy is important, Gleason says, because we rely on satellites so much now, and there’s so much at stake.
“We had two VIIRSs in orbit, and now we have three,” Dr. Gleason said. “We send multiple weather satellites to make sure we always have one going double and now triple. Space is a dangerous environment. Things happen, and you can lose an instrument or a satellite, but we can’t lose data. It’s too important to too many people.”