Land data assimilation advances scientific understanding and serves as an engineering tool for land surface process studies, reflecting the trend of harmonizing theory and data in the big data era.
remote sensing
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Beneath the Ice: Greenland’s Geology Revealed in New Map
Advances in remote sensing offered an opportunity to redraw Greenland’s geologic map for the first time in 15 years.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Fault Maturity or Orientation: Which Matters More for Quakes?
Close examination of a 2021 earthquake on the Tibetan Plateau provides hints that, counter to prior assumptions, the influence of fault orientation can sometimes trump that of maturity.
Posted inNews
Low-Level Clouds Disappear During a Solar Eclipse
Cumulus clouds rapidly dissipate as the land surface cools, a finding that has implications for Sun-obscuring geoengineering efforts.
Posted inScience Updates
Monitoring Polar Ice Change in the Twilight Zone
Landsat’s new extended data collection program is mapping Arctic and Antarctic regions year-round, even in polar twilight.
Posted inEditors' Vox
Accounting for Small-Scale Processes in Large-Scale Models
A new book explores how fast processes can be better represented in atmospheric models to improve weather and climate prediction.
Posted inScience Updates
Trustworthy Satellite Earth Observations for Science and Society
Enhancing confidence in satellite observations of terrestrial properties like land surface temperature and soil moisture requires advances in validation and data quality assessment practices.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Plants Reveal the History of Earth’s Largest Tropical Ice Cap
Rooted plants buried by advancing outlet glaciers illustrate rapid changes in the extent of Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru during the Holocene.
Posted inScience Updates
Ecosystem Observations from Every Angle
Proximal remote sensing provides a bridge between ecosystem flux data at Earth’s surface and optical data from satellite sensors, improving our grasp of feedbacks between terrestrial ecosystems and climate.
Posted inNews
Satellites Map Environmental Vulnerabilities in U.S. Prisons
Geoscientists are using remote sensing to gather data on risks including increased exposure to air and soil pollution, excessive heat, wildfire, and flooding.