The Earth Observatory shares images and stories about the environment, Earth systems, and climate that emerge from NASA research, satellite missions, and models.

The Impact of City Landscapes on Rain “There’s a debate about how cities affect rainfall,” Shepherd answers. “There are several hypotheses about what is going on, but they primarily involve the urban ...

A string of dry years shriveled vegetation in Africa's Sahel, causing some to fear that the Sahara Desert was shifting south. Satellite data spanning more than twenty years now shows that the Sahel is ...

EO Kids is looking at glaciers from space. Imagery and data are showing that many glaciers are shrinking. In the issue, you will discover more about these cool “rivers of ice.” Plus, get the ...

If Earth’s oceans are soaking up the excess heat energy caused by greenhouse gases, then exactly what is the problem? The problem—and perhaps part of the solution as well—is thermal inertia. Inertia ...

Updated Oct 23, 2009 World of Change: El Niño, La Niña, and Rainfall. For many people, El Niño and La Niña mean floods or drought, but the events are actually a warming or cooling of the eastern ...

These shifts in species composition may be benign, or they may result in a cascade of negative consequences throughout the marine food web. Accurate global mapping of phytoplankton taxonomic groups is ...

Brighter clouds, in turn, block sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface, shading the planet and producing net cooling. This cloud brightening effect—called the “cloud albedo effect”—may have a big ...

As the Earth heats up more water will make its way into the atmosphere, trapping even heat near the surface. To predict how much temperatures could rise in the future, scientists are working to ...

But, Rignot notes, scientists just got some better climbing shoes. The mission known as IceBridge carries an array of instruments on airplanes to obtain the most complete picture of Earth’s ice cover ...

In principle, it should be possible to add up each of the individual components of sea level rise—melting continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, retreating glaciers, the thermal expansion ...

More Lawns than Irrigated Corn : Although there was little in the way of published research on estimating U.S. lawn area, the research group Milesi was studying and working with at the University of ...