NASA’s collection of Earth-observing satellites, as well as the sensors and astronauts onboard the International Space Station, captured some fascinating moments on our globe in 2021 as reported by G Captian.
Satellite pictures
The photographs in this collection depict some of the most stunning and complicated occurrences that occurred on our planet in the past year, ranging from record-breaking heatwaves to pandemic-related catastrophes. They also show how NASA’s Earth-observing technologies and missions offer scientists, government agencies, and people all over the world uses information.
Here are some of our favourite satellite images from 2021:
Waiting To Unload
In 2021, rising consumer demand, labour shortages, harsh weather, and a slew of COVID-related supply chain snarls all contributed to cargo ship backlogs at ports around the world. On October 10, the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) obtained this natural-colour image of scores of cargo ships waiting offshore for their turn to unload goods between the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in Southern California, the country’s two busiest container ports.
Traffic congestion in the shipping industry was not limited to Los Angeles or even the United States. According to news reports, container ships queued up offshore in Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai at various times during the year.
Tidal Vortices in the Sea of Okhotsk
Some of the highest diurnal tides in the world—nearly 14 meters (46 feet)—have been recorded in the Sea of Okhotsk.
The waters here are frozen for much of the year.
As the strong tides and currents flow through straits in the Shantar Islands, they encounter rocky outcrops, headlands, capes, and small islands that disrupt the laminar flow.
This can create chains of spiral eddies that rotate in alternate directions as they form.
These chains are known as vortex streets or von Kármán vortices.
The physical processes that create the vortices were first described in 1912 by Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian-American physicist and a co-founder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Braided Paraná
An astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS) snapped this photo of a portion of the Paraná River, the second-longest river in South America.
It flows mostly northeast to southwest for 3,030 miles (4,880 kilometres), passing through Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina and making part of the Argentina–Paraguay border.
This image captures some of the interlocking, braided patterns that are common along with the Paraná River system.
The sediments also make braid bars, which are smaller, rhomboid-shaped landforms created by the interweaving of water and land as the river level rises and falls over time.
This labyrinth of braided channels also provides routes for small boats and ships, allowing for the transport of goods to inland South America—at least as far upstream as the Yacyretá Dam.
River Colors Are Changing
Much like the sky, rivers are rarely painted one colour.
The figure above shows data from a map of river colour for the contiguous United States.
The map was built from 234,727 images collected by Landsat satellites between 1984 and 2018.
The dataset includes 67,000 miles (100,000 kilometres) of waterways of at least 200 feet (60 meters) wide.
While is not unusual for rivers to change colours over time due to fluctuations in flow, concentrations of sediments, and the amount of dissolved organic matter or algae in the water, scientists have found that the most extreme changes often occur near man-made reservoirs.
First Images from Landsat 9
This year, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey provided the public with a powerful new camera to observe our changing planet.
This natural-colour image—which shows the Coronation Islands along the Kimberly coast of Western Australia—was one of the first to be taken by the new Landsat 9 satellite on Oct. 31, 2021, about a month after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Together, the two satellites will collect approximately 1,500 images of Earth’s surface every day, observing the entire planet every eight days.
These instruments can provide users with essential information about crop health, irrigation use, water quality, wildfire severity, deforestation, glacial retreat, and urban expansion, especially when put in the context of the long Landsat data record.
The data from Landsat 9 will be available to the public for free from the USGS website once the satellite begins normal operations in 2022.
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Source: G Captain
