NASA

Notes from the Field

In early September, I drove down to Wallops Flight Facility to set up our GPS base station in preparation for the test flight. The test flight is to verify that everything is working as expected, and ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

On Thursday, August 28 th, I was able to watch AV-6 take off from Wallops Flight Facility. The black plane that you can see in the linked video is flown as an added safety precaution as it follows the ...
NASA

Notes from the Field - NASA Earth Observatory

There is a bit of revolution going on in oceanography. Quite quietly, many new robust autonomous platforms are making ocean observations. The revolution has been growing for a decade and now feels ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

Technology is a wonderful thing until its dark side is appreciated. I have written about plastic in prior blogs. I’ll probably have to write about plastic and the ocean for the rest of my life so more ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

One of the main objectives in the NAAMES mission is to understand what gases and particles present in the surface ocean get into the atmosphere and influence clouds and climate. To help answer this ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

First, to minimize stating a bunch of boring facts and figures, I give you some brief but informative links below to research for yourself. This blog post is more of an emotional statement of alarm ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

The pilot not flying on mission day is called the “mobile” and helps with the flight planning, checks weather, sets up the ER-2 cockpit, does the walkaround and also drives a radio-equipped car behind ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

Well, we finally got some rain. It was only about ten minutes and not very intense, but it was rain. The rest of the day was quite overcast but dry. Considering that there has been a hurricane in the ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

Most of the time, the influence of land (and pollution that people generate) can only be seen a few miles from shore. When flying south into Alaska from the Arctic ocean, we saw the tell-tale ...
NASA

Notes from the Field

For more than 65 hours this month, NASA’s high-altitude ER-2 aircraft flew from Fairbanks over melting sea ice, glaciers, forests, permafrost, lakes, volcanoes and more. It zigged and zagged over the ...
NASA

G-LiHT | Off to a Flying Start

NASA and USDA Forest Service scientists are collaborating on an ambitious project to inventory forest resources in the Tanana Valley of interior Alaska, a region the size of Iowa. The pilot project, ...
NASA

Earth Matters

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The May 2016 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us what part of the world we are looking at, ...