NASA's Grace helps monitor U.S. drought

11.30.11 By Kelly Helm Smith, National Drought Mitigation Center and Adam Voiland, NASA's Earth Science News Team New groundwater and soil moisture drought indicator maps produced by NASA are available on the National Drought Mitigation Center's website. They currently show unusually low groundwater storage levels in Texas. The maps use an 11-division...

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First light for NPP satellite

An image taken by the NPP Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Nov. 21, 2011. This high-resolution image is wrapped on a globe and shows a broad swath of Eastern North America from Canada’s Hudson Bay past Florida to the northern coast of Venezuela. The NASA NPP Team at the Space Science and Engineering Center, UW-Madison created the...

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The end of the IceBridge

11.29.11 By Alan Brown, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center NASA's DC-8 airborne science laboratory has completed its 2011 Operation IceBridge science flights over Antarctica, and arrived home at its base in Palmdale, Calif., Nov. 22. The IceBridge flight and science team flew a record 24 science flights during the six-week campaign, recording data...

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To the ends of the Earth

A close-up image of the crack spreading across the ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier shows the details of the boulder-like blocks of ice that fell into the rift when it split. For most of the 18-mile stretch of the crack that NASA’s DC-8 flew over on Oct. 26, 2011, it stretched about 240 feet wide, as roughly seen here. The deepest points ranged from...

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Watching the birth of an iceberg

A photo from the window of NASA's DC-8 shows the rift across the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf running off toward the horizon.Credit: Michael Studinger/NASA PUNTA ARENAS, CHILE – After discovering an emerging crack that cuts across the floating ice shelf of Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge has flown a follow-up...

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