Google Earth Satellite Pro
Josephine Heathershaw
The World in Real-Time global map utilizes Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to provide a live satellite view of select data from geostationary and polar-orbiting NOAA satellites and partner satellites of the Earth from space.
Live satellite images are updated every 10 minutes from NOAA GOES and JMA Himawari geostationary satellites. EUMETSAT Meteosat images are updated every 15 minutes. Blue clouds at night represent fog and low-lying clouds. City lights at night are not live.
Thermal satellite sensors can provide surface temperature and emissivity information. The Earth Engine data catalog includes both land and sea surface temperature products derived from several spacecraft sensors, including MODIS, ASTER, and AVHRR, in addition to raw Landsat thermal data.
You can use atmospheric data to help correct image data from other sensors, or you can study it in its own right. The Earth Engine catalog includes atmospheric datasets such as ozone data from NASA's TOMS and OMI instruments and the MODIS Monthly Gridded Atmospheric Product.
Weather datasets describe forecasted and measured conditions over short periods of time, including precipitation, temperature, humidity, and wind, and other variables. Earth Engine includes forecast data from NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS) and the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFSv2), as well as sensor data from sources like the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM).
Landsat, a joint program of the USGS and NASA, has been observing the Earth continuously from 1972 through the present day. Today the Landsat satellites image the entire Earth's surface at a 30-meter resolution about once every two weeks, including multispectral and thermal data.
The Copernicus Program is an ambitious initiative headed by the European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). The Sentinels include all-weather radar images from Sentinel-1A and -1B, high-resolution optical images from Sentinel 2A and 2B, as well as ocean and land data suitable for environmental and climate monitoring from Sentinel 3.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites have been acquiring images of the Earth daily since 1999, including daily imagery, 16-day BRDF-adjusted surface reflectance, and derived products such as vegetation indices and snow cover.
High-resolution imagery captures the finer details of landscapes and urban environments. The US National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) offers aerial image data of the US at one-meter resolution, including nearly complete coverage every several years since 2003.
Land cover maps describe the physical landscape in terms of land cover classes such as forest, grassland, and water. Earth Engine includes a wide variety of land cover datasets, from near real-time Dynamic World to global products such as ESA World Cover.
Cropland data is key to understanding global water consumption and agricultural production. Earth Engine includes a number of cropland data products such as the USDA NASS Cropland Data Layers, as well as layers from the Global Food Security-Support Analysis Data (GFSAD) including cropland extent, crop dominance, and watering sources.
Data from other satellite image sensors is available in Earth Engine as well, including night-time imagery from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS), which has collected imagery of night-time lights at approximately 1-kilometer resolution continuously since 1992.
A New York Times article came out today that highlights the importance of climate data record continuity and just how fortunate we have been over the past 20 years having Terra, Aqua and Aura satelites to monitor the earth.
Aqua, Latin for water, is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds,precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures.
The Aqua mission is a part of the NASA-centered international Earth Observing System (EOS). Aqua was formerly named EOS PM, signifying its afternoon equatorial crossing time. A timeline of Aqua on-orbit progress through the initial 120 day check-out period can be found here.
Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002, and has six Earth-observing instruments on board, collecting a variety of global data sets. Aqua was originally developed for a six-year design life but has now far exceeded that original goal.
Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E), suffered a major anomaly in October 2011 and ceased its high-quality data transmission at that time. Later the instrument was turned back on, and it transmitted reduced quality data important for intercalibration purposes before being powered off in March 2016.
When OCO-2 was launched, it the A-Train, followed by GCOM-W1, Aqua, CALIPSO, CloudSat, and Aura. By early 2022, CloudSat, CALIPSO, and Aqua had all exited the A-Train. Due to fuel limitations, Aqua completed the last of its drag makeup maneuvers in December 2021 and is now in a free-drift mode, slowly descending below the A-Train and drifting to later equatorial crossing times.
A recent review and summary of current research by the NASA Terra Aqua Suomi-NPP Land Discipline Team has recently been published in regards to their efforts to provide continity of global land data products between two instruments: NASA MODIS and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The two MODIS instruments on Terra and Aqua have provided valuable data for more than 20 years, and as these satellite platforms age, it is imperative to maintain data continuity with other instruments in orbit, such as VIIRS. Hence, the land data products from MODIS are now being transitioneed to being producing using VIIRS data. This publications highlights the intercomparison and evaluation between these two products. The results provide primising levels of agreement and accuracy between the two products in in several cases. The image below shows an example of MODIS (MYD10A1) and VIIRS (VNP10A1, VJ110A1) product comparison of maps showing land surface classifciations between ocean, land, snow cover and clouds.
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Thousands of satellites and 1500 rocket bodies provide considerable mass in LEO, which can break into debris upon collisions, explosions, or degradation in the harsh space environment. Fragmentations increase the cross-section of orbiting material, and with it, the collision probability per time. Eventually, collisions could dominate on-orbit evolution, a situation called the Kessler Syndrome3. There are already over 12,000 trackable debris pieces in LEO, with these being typically 10 cm in diameter or larger. Including sizes down to 1 cm, there are about a million inferred debris pieces, all of which threaten satellites, spacecraft and astronauts due to their orbits crisscrossing at high relative speeds. Simulations of the long-term evolution of debris suggest that LEO is already in the protracted initial stages of the Kessler Syndrome, but that this could be managed through active debris removal4. The addition of satellite mega-constellations and the general proliferation of low-cost satellites in LEO stresses the environment further5,6,7,8.
The rapid development of the space environment through mega-constellations, predominately by the ongoing construction of Starlink, is shown by the cumulative payload distribution function (Fig. 1). From an environmental perspective, the slope change in the distribution function defines NewSpace, an era of dominance by commercial actors. Before 2015, changes in the total on-orbit objects came principally from fragmentations, with effects of the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test and the 2009 Kosmos-2251/Iridium-33 collisions being evident on the graph.
Cumulative on-orbit distribution functions (all orbits). Deorbited objects are not included. The 2007 and 2009 spikes are a Chinese anti-satellite test and the Iridium 33-Kosmos 2251 collision, respectively. The recent, rapid rise of the orange curve represents NewSpace (see "Methods").
Orbital distribution and density information for objects in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). (Left) Distribution of payloads (active and defunct satellites), binned to the nearest 1 km in altitude and 1 in orbital inclination. The centre of each circle represents the position on the diagram, and the size of the circle is proportional to the number of satellites within the given parameter space. (Right) Number density of different space resident objects (SROs) based on 1 km radial bins, averaged over the entire sky. Because SRO objects are on elliptical orbits, the contribution of a given object to an orbital shell is weighted by the time that object spends in the shell. Despite significant parameter space, satellites are clustered in their orbits due to mission requirements. The emerging Starlink cluster at 550 km and 55 inclination is already evident in both plots (Left and Right).
Deorbiting satellites will be tracked and operational satellites can manoeuvre to avoid close conjunctions. However, this depends on ongoing communication and cooperation between operators, which at present is ad hoc and voluntary. A recent letter12 to the FCC from SpaceX suggests that some companies might be less-than-fully transparent about events13 in LEO.
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