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JULY 15, 2024 Natural Events

LATEST IMAGES FROM THE PAST 7 DAYS view archive of natural events

Extreme Heat Hammers U.S. Coasts As summer heat hit the western and eastern U.S. in July 2024, temperatures have been especially high in the Southwest. (Jul 11, 2024)       A Smoky Summer in Amur Fires have been flaring periodically in this eastern region of Russia since May. (Jul 10, 2024)       Carriacou After Beryl The Category 4 hurricane caused widespread damage to infrastructure and vegetation on the Grenadine island. (Jul 9, 2024)       Beryl Makes Landfall in Texas The early season hurricane downed trees and cut off power for over two million homes and businesses near Houston. (Jul 8, 2024)

NASA | 8800 Greenbelt Rd., Greenbelt, MD 20771 EARTHDATA DISCOVERY OPEN ACCESS FOR OPEN SCIENCE | JULY 2024 New Perspectives on Sunglint in Satellite Imagery The flash of sunlight off reflective surfaces—sunglint—can both hinder and help satellite imagery analysis. NASA scientists are uncovering new aspects of sunglint and developing new data products that are making this atmospheric phenomenon a useful tool. NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) captures full disk images of the sunlit face of Earth. A new sunglint EPIC data product is available in Earthdata Search. Explore the EPIC glint product  Articles NASA FIRMS Helps Protect Lives and Property in Canada’s Northwest Territories Canada’s Northwest Territories cover more than 500,000 square miles, with almost half the territory forested. NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) is an important tool for locating wildfires rapidly in this remote region. A Closer Look at FIRMS NASA FIRMS provides rapid access to wildfire data, with some data products available in one minute or less. Learn more about this global system, the NASA data it provides, and how to navigate the FIRMS Global and FIRMS US/Canada Fire Maps. Exploring the Northwest Passage with NASA Snow and Sea Ice Data As Arctic sea ice retreats, interest has grown in navigating the Northwest Passage connecting the Barents Sea north of Scandinavia to the Bering Strait between the Russian Far East and Alaska. NASA data are helping scientists analyze sea ice trends and predict the future navigability of this route. Creating a More Solid Foundation for Data Products Algorithm Theoretical Basis Documents (ATBDs) provide the mathematical basis for data product development. The Algorithm Publication Tool (APT) is streamlining ATBD creation and helping to revolutionize how these documents are shared and used. NASA Data Used to Create New Weather and Climate Foundation Model Applying artificial intelligence to NASA weather and climate model data helped create a new open-source foundation model (FM): Prithvi-weather-climate. This FM has the potential to not only improve forecasting and public safety, but also unlock some of the secrets behind our changing climate.  Webinars & Events Hydrology from Space July 16, 2024 A free and open workshop for using data from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission is part of the Hacking Limnology Virtual Summit. The Summit is a week-long series of talks and workshops focused on open data science and modeling by early career scientists and researchers. ESIP Summer Meeting Explores the Power of Data Ethics July 22-26, 2024 There’s still time to register for the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting. The meeting takes place in Asheville, NC, and online with the theme of Grounded in Trust: Data Ethics Empower Collaboration. GPM 10-in-10 Webinar Series August 1, 2024 The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission team is hosting 10 webinars throughout 2024 focusing on precipitation measurement from space. The August webinar focus is on NASA’s vast trove of precipitation data and ways to access and work with these free and openly available data. Exploring River Deltas with NASA Data: The Delta-X Mission Recorded June 26, 2024 Learn more about NASA’s Delta-X mission, including its objectives, campaigns, and datasets. The webinar includes information about Jupyter Notebook tutorials for working with Delta-X data and models along with data discovery and data access demonstrations.  New Data, Tutorials, & Resources Discover New NASA Earth Science Data Read summaries of the latest data products, services, and tools released over the past month. New Tool for Rapid Water Quality Assessment The Satellite-based Analysis Tool for Rapid Evaluation of Aquatic Environments (STREAM) combines machine learning with satellite data to enable rapid evaluation of chlorophyll-a concentrations, measurements of Secchi disk depth, and assessments of total suspended solids. Simplifying Access to Cloud-Based NASA Earth Science Data in R The earthdatalogin package in R streamlines access to NASA cloud-based data for users working in the R programming language. The work builds on a similar package for Python users that is part of the earthaccess library. Demo Prototype Portal for the Prithvi-Geospatial Foundation Model Earth Insights is a system that leverages the open-source Prithvi-geospatial foundation model developed by NASA and IBM Research to allow users to explore fine-tuned flood mapping and burn scar models and visualize the results. Illustrating Ocean Processes with Panoply and Giovanni The second article in this series shows how to use NASA’s Giovanni and Panoply applications to create visualizations related to atmospheric processes. New Features Added to U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center Portal New carbon dioxide and methane data, expanded spatial and temporal resolution for several datasets, and an enhanced data exploration environment are some of the updates in this beta release. Updated Tool for Exploring Data Related to Energy Resources The new Data Access Viewer enhanced (DAVe) by NASA’s Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) Project makes it easier to explore Earth science data related to renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and agroclimatology.  OpenScience Earn Your Open Science Digital Badge Open Science 101 is a free self-paced public training to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to navigate the principles and practices of open science. Virtual workshops in Spanish are available. School’s In for Open Science NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS) is hosting three free public instructor-led workshops in Illinois to take you through the Open Science 101 curriculum. Workshops take place in Chicago (July 15-19), Urbana (July 29-August 2), and Wheeling (August 5-9).  Worldview Images of the Week  High Dust Score Over Sardinia and Sicily Data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) are used to create the Dust Score, which calculates the likelihood of atmospheric dust being present over an observed area. Darker colors indicate a higher certainty that dust is present. Fires in Brazil’s Pantanal The Pantanal in Brazil is the world’s largest freshwater wetland. Fire season in the Pantanal normally starts in July and peaks in August and September. Low rainfall and dry conditions have led to an early—and intense—start to the region’s 2024 fire season. Thermal Anomaly Layer Helps Pinpoint Wildfires in Nighttime Imagery It can be difficult in nighttime imagery to tell artificial illumination from city lights from natural illumination from wildfires. An overlay of the fires and thermal anomalies layer highlights areas of high heat output as red dots. NASA's Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program oversees the life cycle of NASA’s Earth science data and seeks to maximize the scientific return from missions and experiments.