Author: avoiland

Viva la (Geospatial) Revolution!



Our hats are off to the folks at Penn State Public Broadcasting for explaining how mapping technologies are changing our world for the better with their Geospatial Revolution Project. Their latest video, the fourth in a series, features NASA Goddard’s Compton Tucker and Molly Brown. The best quote (emphasis mine) comes from Brown:“When you’re making decisions, you can’t just take anecdotal information. You need quantified, explicit information which really will let you determine: is this bad, is this really bad, so we don’t over respond, and we don’t ignore a real problem.” Whether you’re talking about anticipating famine, predicting a hurricane’s path, or mitigating climate change, Brown’s comments are right on target.  –Adam Voiland

The Home Frontier: Enter Our Earth Day Video Contest

Everyone knows NASA as the space exploration agency. It’s easy to forget that exploring Earth is also exploring a celestial body. It is, in fact, the only planet we’ve ever been to — our Home Frontier.

For Earth Day 2011, we ask you to step back from the daily, incremental science results, and think about a larger question: What is inspiring to you about our home planet? What is important and vital about NASA’s exploration of Earth? Then, go capture that in a short web video.

Read more about The Home Frontier: NASA’s Earth Day Video Contest.

Get free footage of Earth from NASA to use in your video.

On Earth Day: A Look Back at System Z and the Early Days of EOS

I get plenty of quizzical looks when I tell people I’m a NASA science writer who covers Earth science.

“Earth science? NASA?”

There’s often a pause for a few seconds as the person I’ve told mulls this over. For a surprising number of people, that combination of words doesn’t compute.

Often strings of questions follow: “Oh, so you must write about the Space Shuttle, right? Do you know how long it would take to send astronauts to Mars? Do you think there’s life on Titan?”

When I explain that most of what I write about involves unmanned Earth-observing satellites that monitor less exotic phenomena such as Earth’s weather and climate — not astronauts — it frequently comes as a let-down.

This week, however, I stumbled across a fascinating tidbit of NASA history that reminded me that the line between Earth science and manned spaceflight hasn’t always been so stark.

As I was looking back at the origins of NASA’s current fleet of Earth-observing satellites for a feature story about a soon-to-launch satellite called NPP, I did some reading about an intriguing plan to have manned spaceflight at the center of NASA’s Earth science efforts.

One of the early strategies proposed for monitoring Earth — developed in the late-1970s and early-1980s and dubbed System Z — called for the Space Shuttle to lift a series of Hubble-sized, polar-orbiting Earth-observing platforms into space. 

Spacewalking astronauts would assemble the massive platforms and perform regular maintenance on the instruments. The money for System Z  would have come from  Space Station Freedom (the NASA project that led eventually to the current International Space Station). If implemented, the ambitious plan would have been one of the most expansive projects NASA had ever undertaken and rival the Apollo program in scope and complexity.

Looking back, it was heady stuff. The goal was to make a broad suite of coordinated measurements that would parse out how the many components of the Earth system function as an interconnected whole.

However, the Challenger disaster — and the realization that large platforms were too risky — dealt System Z a serious blow. When NASA abandoned efforts to launch the Space Shuttle from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a site  better than Cape Canaveral in Florida for achieving polar orbit, plans for an astronaut-tended Earth-observing platforms faded away as well.

But the dream of having satellites making a broad array of coordinated measurements from polar-orbiting platforms didn’t. It morphed instead, after a decades of downsizing and rescoping, into the current configuration of the Earth Observing System (EOS), a fleet of unmanned spacecraft that is anchored by the medium-sized flagships Terra, Aqua, and Aura. 

Today, more than a decade after the launch of the first EOS flagship, data from EOS satellites have revolutionized earth and climate science. Thousands of technical papers have been published based on EOS data and the satellites have helped pioneer a whole new branch of science called Earth Systems Science. 

Want to learn more about the early days of the EOS program? The NASA Earth Observer newsletter has been running a fascinating series of perspective pieces authored by the people who helped conceive it that make for good Earth Day reading. Here are a few of them:


Imagery
Top: This Earthrise photo was the first view of Earth captured by astronauts in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA
Middle: NASA’s constellation of Earth-observing satellites as of 2011. Credit: NASA
Bottom: An early sketch of “System Z.” Credit: Mark Abbott; Originally published by the Earth Observer


–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Have the Last Four Summers and Winters Felt Warmer?


During a congressional hearing in 1988, Goddard Institute for Space Studies climatologist James Hansen predicted that a perceptive person would be able to notice the climate was changing by the early 21st century. Has his prediction panned out? He digs into the topic in a discussion published this week on his website.


The short answer: yes, depending on where you live, you should be able to tell that in the last four years, for example, summers have been warmer than average. The last four winters have also been noticeably mild in most parts of the world. (Though it’s worth noting that the last two winters in the continental United States have actually been cooler than average).

Read on below to see how Hansen explains it in more detail. (I’ve excerpted some of the more accessible sections of the text and two graphs, but the full discussion is available here as a pdf.)  More context and details about trends in the global surface temperature record are also available.

This past winter, for the second year in a row, seemed pretty extreme in both Europe and the United States. So this is a good time to check quantitatively how seasonal climate change is stacking up against expectations.

People’s perception of climate change may be the most important factor determining their willingness to accept the scientific conclusion that humans are causing global warming (or global climate disruption, as you please). Itis hard to persuade people that they have lying eyes.

In the paperattached to my congressional testimony in 1988 (1) we asserted that theperceptive person would notice that climate was changing by the early21st century. Now we can check the degree to which the real world has lived up to this expectation. The answer will vary from one place to another, so let’s make a global map for this past winter. Each gridbox will be colored red, white or blue, depending on how the local temperature this past winter compared with the categories established by the 1951-1980 climatology.

Figure 7 (above) shows the result for the last four winters (summers in the Southern Hemisphere). To make the maps even more useful we use dark blue and dark red to show those places in which the temperature fell in the extreme (>2 standard deviations) category that occurred only a few percent of the time in the period of climatology1. The extreme cases are important because those are the ones that have greatest practical implications, especially for nature. Species are adapted to climate of the past, so a change to more extreme climates can be detrimental, especially if it occurs so rapidly that species cannot migrate to stay within tolerable climatic conditions.

The numbers on the top of the maps are the percent of the area falling in the five categories: very cold, cold, normal, hot, very hot. In the period of climatology those numbers averaged 2%, 31%, 33%, 31%, 2%, rounded to the nearest percent.

Figure 7 reveals, for example, that the past two winters in Northern Europe both fell in the category of “cold” winters, but not extreme cold. The area hot or very hot (51-73%) far exceeded the area with cold or very cold conditions in all four years (14-27%).

Figure 8 (top) shows results for Jun-Jul-Aug for each of the past four years. In both Jun-Jul- Aug and Dec-Jan-Feb it is apparent that the area falling in either the hot or very hot category totals 64-78% in agreement with our 1988 climate simulations.

The perceptive person who is old enough should be able to recognize that the frequency of unusually mild winters is now much greater than it was in the period 1951-1980. But mild winters may not have much practical impact. So a return to one or two colder than average winters may affect the public’s perception of climate change.

On the other hand, the huge increase in the area with extremely hot summers, from 2-3% in 1951-1980 to as much as 30-40 percent in recent years and most of the land area in 2010. If people cannot recognize that summers are becoming more extreme they may need to have their senses examined or their memories. Perhaps the people who do not recognize climate change are living in air-conditioned environments, which are restricted mainly to one species.

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Tsunami Hits Home for Goddard Scientist

On March 11, Teppei Yasunari, 31, a visiting scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, heard that a massive earthquake off the coast of Japan had rocked his homeland and unleashed a deadly tsunami. For Yasunari, an atmospheric scientist who studies the climate effects of tiny airborne particles called aerosols, the frantic days that followed have offered powerful lessons in both patience and science communication as Yasunari grappled with the news that one of his best friends was missing and that a nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture seemed poised to send a plume of radioactive steam aloft. We sat down with Yasunari to hear his perspective on the disaster.

WoE: You are both an Earth scientist and Japanese. What went through your mind when you heard about the tsunami?

Yasunari: Like everybody, I was shocked. There are no words to describe it. It was hard to believe the video clips I was seeing on the web.

WoE: I know you grew up in Kyoto and Tsukuba, but have you spent any time in Sendai?

Yasunari: Some. I went to undergraduate college in Aomori prefecture, which is not so far from Sendai. I have visited friends who live in Sendai a number of times. 

WoE: Were your friends from college ok?

Yasunari: One of the first things I did after I heard the news was try to contact one of my best friends from Hirosaki University who now lives in Iwate prefecture, which is just immediately north of Miyagi prefecture, the prefecture the earthquake hit the hardest. I tried emailing and calling, but I couldn’t get through. All lines of communication were down. I tried calling friends of friends. Nothing worked. Finally, I registered his name in Google Person Finder.

WoE: How long were you in limbo?

Yasunari: About three days. Finally, I saw something on Person Finder that said he was probably ok. A friend of his from grade school had heard from somebody else that a firefighter had found him. I later heard through Person Finder that he’d been moved to someone’s home, but I still haven’t been able to email or call him. On March 22, I did get an e-mail directly from him. He said his house has been completely destroyed by the tsunami. It was such a relief to have finally heard from him directly.

WoE: I imagine you must have been glued to the Internet looking for information. 

Yasunari: Yes, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Japanese SNS. Since the phone and power is out in some parts of Japan, these sites are often the quickest way to get information. My personal Twitter feed is @TJ_Yasbee.

WoE: Did you look to Twitter for scientific information about what was going on with the earthquake and nuclear plant?

Yasunari: Yes. Actually something surprising happened on Twitter. Since I have studied the long range transport of aerosols, I calculated some air mass transport patterns using the NOAA atmospheric dispersion model called HYSPLIT when I heard about the possibility of a radioactive plume, I wanted to help, so I made some simple figures that showed what direction, based on the model, a plume might move.

WoE: And you tweeted the figures? 

Yasunari: Yes. I only had less than 300 followers at that point. However, a physicist from the University of Tokyo, Ryugo Hayano, saw the figures and contacted me by email. He ended up tweeting his comments with my figure to his more than 40,000 followers. Neither of us could have imagined how quickly that tweet spread. It wasn’t long before newspapers were contacting me to use the figures. I couldn’t believe it.

WoE: Forty-thousand followers is quite a lot for a scientist.

Yasunari: He is well known. He tweets from @hayano. Now he has more than 150,000 followers in just a couple of days because of the earthquake. 

WoE: Did you see a surge of followers on Twitter as well? 

Yasunari: Yes, originally I had about 300. Now I have more than 2,100.

WoE: How did people react to the figures?

Yasunari: The model I made the figures with has quite a coarse resolution, and it can’t show any more than a broad view of how a plume might move. But people in Japan are so worried about the threat of radiation and eager for information that some of them treated it like it was very fine resolution and accurate. 

WoE: So did the newspapers end up using the figure?

Yasunari: In the end, in consultation with a scientist from NOAA, we decided that it would be more confusing than helpful for the public. We asked the newspapers not to use them, and I took them down from Twitter. I learned a lot from this.

WoE: You can’t really delete a tweet, though, can you?

Yasunari: No, but I had tweeted it through Twitpics, and professor Hayano had use a similar site called Plixi, so we were able to take the figures down.

WoE: It certainly raises interesting questions about social media and science communication. Do you wish you had never tweeted the figure in the first place?

Yasunari: Yes and no. The tweet was intended just for my small number of followers, but I never realized how quickly it would spread. Of course, I expected it would spread some, but I didn’t expect it to go viral. In the future, I will be much more aware that the public doesn’t pay much attention to the uncertainties when I show a figure.

At the same time, I wish they would. Twitter and other social media can be a very convenient way for scientists to communicate, so I don’t want to say that scientists should never use social media or have a blog. I guess the best thing to do is try to find a balance between showing too much information and too little.

WoE: What about your family? Were they affected by the earthquake? 

Yasunari: I contacted my family immediately after the earthquake. They were fine because they live in a western part of Japan, about 500 miles away from Sendai. We were extremely lucky. My father, also a scientist, was supposed to be in Sendai on business the day of the earthquake. Fortunately, he canceled the trip the day before he was suppose to leave because he was busy with other things. 

WoE: How lucky. Does your father also study aerosols and climate? 

Yasunari: No, but he is also an atmospheric scientist. He focuses on meteorology and climatology related to Asian monsoons. In fact, he has collaborated with Bill Lau, the chief of the branch I’m in at Goddard. Both Bill Lau and my father are examining the idea that aerosols can have an important impact on the monsoons — a hypothesis called the “elevated heat pump.”

WoE: Is that a topic that you study as well?

Yasunari: In some ways, yes. I recently published a paper that will help quantify how much black carbon and dust are affecting the rate of Himalayan glacier retreat. Another study, led by a scientist from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, cited both my paper and my father’s paper at the same time. It was the first time double Yasunari reference in the same paper.

WoE: Thanks for talking to us, and best of luck to your friend.

Yasunari: You’re welcome.  I know Japan will overcome this difficult situation.

Top Image: A United States Air Force satellite observed the widespread loss of electricity in parts of northeastern Japan after the earthquake. The image, a composite, shows functioning electricity from 2010 and 2011. Red indicates power outages detected on March 12, 2011, compared to data from 2010. For more information about the map, please visit this page. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/NOAA National Geophysical Data Center.

Middle Image: Teppei Yasunari in his office. Credit: NASA/Adam Voiland

Lower Image: A shaking intensity map based on USGS data shows ground motion at multiple locations across Japan during the earthquake. A shaking intensity of VI is considered “strong” and can produce “light damage,” while a IX on the scale is described as “violent” and likely to produce “heavy damage. For more information about the map, please visit this page.  Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Rob Simmon & Jesse Allen

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

The Curious Case of Lake Superior's Shrinking Cloud Street Droplets


Parallel lines of cumulus clouds often appear when frigid, dry winds rush over comparatively warm bodies of water. NASA satellites have observed the striking cloud formations – which atmospheric scientists call “cloud streets” — over the Hudson Bay, Greenland Sea, Bering Sea, and the Amery Ice Shelf a number of times in the past.

Recently, University of Wisconsin scientist Steve Ackerman was combing through data from NASA’s MODIS instrument as part of an effort to catalog and classify different cloud types. Something about the street clouds in this image of Lake Superior (above) struck him as peculiar. We caught up with him during a poster session at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco to find out more.

WoE: What are we looking at here?

Ackerman: These are cloud streets. They’re really quite interesting clouds. They occur when you get cold air blowing over warm water. You get them frequently over the Great Lakes and off the East Coast as well.

WoE: What was it about this particular cloud street set that you found notable?

Ackerman: We actually looked at a series of these, and what we found was that the clouds start small, grow in altitude, get thicker optically, and then do something quite strange and unexpected.

WoE: Strange and unexpected? Please explain…

Ackerman: Yes, often what happens is that the size of the cloud droplets grow as we’d expect at first, but then partway across the lake the size of the particles starts to decrease.

WoE: And that’s surprising?

Ackerman: Yes, we have no idea why they’d do that. They should be getting progressively bigger as they move across the lake and pick up moisture.

WoE: About how big are these cloud droplets, and how do they change over time?

Ackerman: They start off at about 5 microns. (For reference, human hair is about 100 microns.) They grow up to about 20 microns, and then they drop down to 10 microns.

WoE: How long does that process take?

Ackerman: About four hours.

WoE: Why do think it’s happening? 

Ackerman: We’re really not sure. Perhaps dry air is coming in from above.

WoE: Is this the only time you’ve observed this phenomenon?

Ackerman: It’s pretty rare. We found it in the MODIS imagery in the five years that we looked about 15 times.

WoE: What makes a peculiar phenomenon like this worth studying?

Ackerman: The next step is to work with cloud modelers and to see if they’re modeling things well enough to explain what’s going on. If the models can’t recreate unusual events like these cloud streets, we know they’re not getting things right. We need models to get the global climate right, and also the weather prediction right. 

The top image comes from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS).  The other two images are courtesy of Steve Ackerman.

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Can NASA Satellites Monitor Radiation Plumes from the Fukushima Disaster?


NASA is using multiple satellites and sensors to monitor the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that rattled Japan on March 11.

However, NASA’s Earth-observing satellites are unable to directly measure radiation-containing plumes, such as those experts fear may have wafted from a damaged Japanese nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture.

We checked in with Robert Cahalan, the head of Goddard Space Flight Center’s Climate and Radiation Branch and the project scientist for the SORCE satellite, to find out why. Here’s how Cahalan explained it:

“NASA could fly a drone directly into a cloud to detect radioactivity, but it’s not easy to measure the damaging radiation from the Fukushima plant with a satellite. 

The radiation consists mostly of negatively charged electrons from so-called “beta decay” of radioactive products of the nuclear fission reactions, as well as positively charged alpha particles, which are identical to a helium nucleus (for example, two protons and two neutrons all bound together into a single particle). 



NASA does have detectors in space that measure such charged particles, but the great majority of these particles don’t come from Earth. Rather, they come from the sun, which emits a very large number of charged particles in what is called the “solar wind” — which is especially intense when the sun is active. The particles can also come from sources outside our solar system, so-called galactic cosmic rays, or GCRs, that become more detectable when the sun is less active.

Fortunately, we humans down on Earth are protected from a lot of this particle radiation by Earth’s magnetic field, which steers charged particles along the field lines toward Earth’s magnetic poles, and thus acts as a shield for the human population. 

Trying to pick out the Fukushima radioactivity from the huge number of charged particles in outer space would be like finding the proverbial “needle in the haystack.” So, unfortunately, we have to rely on ground-based particle detectors, like the common Geiger counters that have been shown in use by the workers in their white hazmat suits in the tragic scenes in Japan.
 


There is also high-energy gamma radiation, which is electromagnetic radiation. Again, NASA has had the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) in space, and now has FERMI. But these look for extremely intense bursts of gamma radiation that come from colliding galaxies, quasars, and other extreme events in the universe. The low flux of gamma radiation from the nuclear power plant is all absorbed in the Earth’s atmosphere, and never makes it into space. The only way we might detect some gamma radiation from Earth’s surface would be if we created a gamma ray burst by detonating a large nuclear bomb. That kind of event cannot happen in a nuclear reactor, even in the worst case of a core meltdown.

NASA’s Earth-observing satellites monitor many health related quantities including aerosols and ozone, nitrous oxides, and other constituents in the air we breathe, as well as fires, floods, and other events that impact life on Earth; however, near-Earth radioactivity can only be detected near the radioactive source, not by satellites.”

Visualization of solar wind and Earth’s magnetosphere courtesy of Steele Hill and NASA’s SOHO team. Visit this page for more information.

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

A Moment for Glory

NASA held a press conference about its soon-to-launch Glory satellite on January 20 in Washington, DC. The  mission will advance understanding of the energy budget and climate change by taking critical measurements of aerosols and total solar irradiance.

Want to learn more about Glory? Read an overview of the mission, view one of these two image galleries, brush up on aerosol science, take a look at this Q & A (pdf), follow along on Twitter, or browse the mission websites. Also, see what Nature, Discovery, and SpaceFlight Now have to say about Glory.

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Is Coagulation Geoengineering's Achilles' Heel?


Jason English, a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a participant in NASA’s Graduate School Researchers Program, chats with us about some of his recent research into geoengineering.

WoE: Do you find there is a taboo of sorts against studying geoengineering among Earth scientists? It’s fairly unusual to see the topic come up at conferences, so your poster caught our eye.

English: There is more acceptance of studying it in just the last couple of years. I think scientists are facing the reality that countries aren’t doing much to slow the emissions of greenhouse gases. Eventually, we may have to choose between the risks and consequences of climate change and the risks and consequences of climate engineering. The only way to make an educated decision about that is to study it.

WoE: What type of geoengineering are you focusing on?

English: For my PhD, I have been looking at stratospheric aerosols.

WoE: Hold up. What are stratospheric aerosols?

English: They’re the tiny particles that are aloft in the atmosphere about 20 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. One of the leading geoengineering ideas is to inject aerosols into the stratosphere. I decided, after getting help and input from colleagues such as Michael Mills and Brian Toon, to set up a computer model that would analyze exactly how something like that would work.

WoE: And what do stratospheric aerosols have to do with climate?

English: People have suggested we could use a type of a particle for geoengineering that is actually composed of tiny droplets of sulfuric acid. Those are called sulfates. Sulfates reflect sunlight. If you have a layer of these particles up in the stratosphere they reflect part of the incoming solar radiation from the sun back to space. Overall, they have a cooling effect.


WoE: And sulfates can make it all the way up to the stratosphere?

English: Yes, some of the stronger volcanic eruptions can send particles into the stratosphere. They take a couple of years to settle back down to the surface. Very tiny amounts from power plants and other sources can also make it up that far.

WoE: I get that you modeled what might happen if humans decided to inject sulfates into the stratosphere, but what was the precise question you set out to answer?

English: There have been a few other scientists who have looked at geoengineering using stratospheric aerosols, but they didn’t simulate all the processes that can affect the particles. Recently, a team led by Patricia Heckendorn, a researcher based in Zurich, simulated all of these processes in a 2D model and found that the effectiveness of sulfate geoengineering diminished as more sulfate was added. I wanted to use a 3D model that looked at all of the processes, and I wanted to compare our results to Heckendorn’s.

WoE: What processes did you include that others didn’t?


English: For example, our model simulates coagulation, the process by which multiple particles can combine to become one. We also included nucleation – that’s when tiny gas molecules condense on each other to form liquid droplets. Also condensational growth. If you watch, say, water drops grow bigger and bigger on a piece of grass on a foggy morning you’re looking at condensational growth.

WoE: What did you find when you included all of that in your model?

English: What we found was that effective geoengineering required injecting larger masses of sulfuric acid than some have hoped because the particles coagulate and get much bigger than thought. Larger particles fall out of the stratosphere faster to the surface, so they’re not as effective at reflecting light. This matched Heckendorn’s results.

WoE: How much less effective?

English: It depends on how much sulfate we add. The more we add the less effective they become.

WoE: That’s the opposite of what people probably think…

English: It still gets more effective as you add more, but it has a diminishing return. We haven’t done a detailed assessment yet, but the group led by Heckendorn did, and they had a similar result. They found that you would need to inject more than 10 million metric tons of sulfur into the stratosphere per year if you wanted to offset the current forcing from greenhouse gases. People used to think it could be done with about 3 million metric tons.

WoE: Ten million metric tons sure sounds like a lot.

English: It is. Mount Pinatubo released about 10 million metric tons, but that was a one-time shot. Basically, we would need one or two Mount Pinatubo’s every single year.

WoE: Where do we go from here?

English: These results were surprising. If geoengineering is going to work, I think we’re realizing that scientists will need to look at new and creative ways to add particles to the stratosphere in such a way that they don’t grow too big and fall out too quickly.

Image Information: Astronauts took this image of Mount Etna erupting in 2002. Credit: NASA/JSC/Gateway to Astronaut Photography. The lower image is courtesy of Jason English.

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team

Searching for Rainbows


Image courtesy of Earth Science Picture of the Day. Credit: David Lien, Planetary Science Institute

Ubiquitous airborne particles called aerosols, which can have a big impact on the energy budget, are one the most poorly understood factors that influence our climate. Could searching for rainbows help scientists pinpoint the impact of the perplexing particles? Brain Cairns, the instrument scientist for the Aerosol Polarimetery Sensor (APS) on NASA’s Glory Mission, explains:

“The way that we diagnose whether we have small aerosol particles, big aerosols particles, non-spherical particles, ice particles, cloud droplets is primarily using polarization.

This is the most obvious and visually enticing example of polarization. On the left, is a picture that shows a rainbow. A polarizer was used, so you can actually see that rainbow. On the right, there’s no rainbow because there was no polarizer. The reflected light is so bright you simply can’t see the rainbow without a polarizer.

Why do we want to measure things like rainbows? It’s because the angular distribution and color of that light tells you exactly how big those close droplets are, and it tells you what the width of the size distribution is. This kind of information is what we use when we’re trying to diagnose how clouds form.”

–Adam Voiland, NASA’s Earth Science News Team