NASA has taken the extensive data from their MODIS satellites and created an impressive visualization of large fires across the world from 2002 to 2001, and combines it with snowfall and seasonal changes.
The tour begins by showing extensive grassland fires spreading across interior Australia and the eucalyptus forests in the northwestern and eastern part of the continent. The tour then shifts to Asia where large numbers of agricultural fires are visible first in China in June 2004, then across a huge swath of Europe and western Russia in August. It then moves across India and Southeast Asia, through the early part of 2005. The tour continues across Africa, South America, and concludes in North America.
Surprisingly, even with all the recent fires in the US MidWest, only 2% of the fires in the world occur in the US. Most fires occur in the African savanna from agricultural activity and lightning strikes.
NASA is fairly well known for the many conceptual animations they produce to showcase upcoming launches and projects, and the latest Mars Rover “Curiosity” is no exception. This time, the animation was produced by California’s Bohemian Grey, and is available on the JPL website.
Said Kevin K. Lane, President, Bohemian Grey Inc., “We are tremendously excited to be a part of this historic event. Helping NASA and the public to visualize ‘Curiosity’s’ trek was the type of animation project our company truly excels in both conceptualizing and producing.”
The latest issue of Scientific Computing has a great article from some NASA researchers on analyzing and visualizing airflow around landing gear, in hopes of redesigning them to reduce vibration and “aeroacoustic” effects (eg, Loud rumbling). If you see their “Digital magazine” Version you can see some movies of their visualizations.
To generate the flow animations presented here required saving a small portion (12,000 snapshots or time steps) of the flow simulation record. With each snapshot resulting in a file size on the order of 4 to 5 gigabytes, the total time record saved is in excess of 50 to 70 terabytes of data. Although such an aggregated file size is not excessively large by today’s standards, it is still too large for routine visualization of the results. The push toward much larger simulations (a nose gear computation on a grid twice as large as the current grid is ongoing) precludes relying on traditional methods for post-processing of CFD data; that is, saving the volumetric information at each time step for analysis at a later time, as these are highly inefficient and no longer practical. Such large datasets demand concurrent real-time simulation, analysis and visualization of the flow field without the need to save countless terabytes of information that would soon tax the storage capacity of even the largest supercomputers.
Scientific visualization of high-fidelity, large-scale flow simulations such as these has become an indispensable tool for providing global insights and knowledge that enable the development of viable engineering solutions to pressing environmental issues affecting the public good. The landing gear simulations, for example, together with those from other disciplines relevant to aircraft design, will soon be used to help develop a new breed of subsonic aircraft that will not only reduce noise pollution, but will burn less fuel and produce fewer harmful emissions — all to improve life on our planet.
Earlier today (2:41AM EDT), the sun kicked up a massive solar flare, and luckily NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the whole thing on film.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft caught high-definition video of the flare in different wavelengths. The event registered as a Class M-2 solar flare, which is a medium-class sun storm that should not pose a danger to satellites or infrastructure on Earth.
The images are beautiful, but tomorrow this could wreak a little havoc when the resulting magnetic wave hits earth.
I think everyone knows by now that the amazing images NASA shows from the Hubble Telescope are actually composites made from dozens, sometimes hundreds of images. In a rare behind-the-scenes, NASA has released a timelapse of someone doing the work in the greatest of all image editors, Photoshop.
Hubble images are made, not born. Images must be woven together from the incoming data from the cameras, cleaned up and given colors that bring out features that eyes would otherwise miss. In this video from HubbleSite.org, online home of the Hubble Space Telescope, a Hubble-imaged galaxy comes together on the screen at super-fast speed.
If you love ParaView and VTK, then you should definitely look at this newest press release from Kitware which discusses their recent SBIR win to develop some new features for massive parallelization, for use by NASA.
In this investigative phase Kitware will identify scaling bottlenecks in ParaView, an open-source visualization application currently used by NASA to explore the results of trillion element particle simulations on the Pleiades supercomputer. As the number of processors scales up past ten thousand, Kitware anticipates that the most critical issues will be data IO, architectural overhead, and how to composite of the partial results. Although the Phase I effort of this project is limited to developing prototypes and selecting a solution, if the Phase II effort is funded these improvements will be incorporated into ParaView and the underlying Visualization Toolkit (VTK) which will benefit tens of thousands of researchers world-wide.
Paraview already works surprisingly well on large-problems, but the 100,000 core runs their mentioning are problematic for any piece of software. I can’t wait to see what they add!
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a satellite launched by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is a space based telescope since the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays. Chandra is 100 times more sensitive to X-ray sources than previous X-ray telescopes.
Chandra has been observing a supernova remnant called Cassiopeia A for 10 years. This supernova remnant is located approximately 11,000 light years away from Earth. As one might expect it is located in the constellation Cassiopeia. While the supernova occurred 11,000 years ago, its light would have reached earth about 300 years ago. Unfortunately, there are no historical records of anyone observing the supernova.
Scientists believe that the star that exploded into a supernova is now a neutron star. During the time that Cassiopeia A has been under observation, this neutron star has slowly cooled down by about 4%. Why has it cooled down?
Two new papers by independent research teams show that this cooling is likely caused by a neutron superfluid forming in its central regions, the first direct evidence for this bizarre state of matter in the core of a neutron star.
Normally we think of matter as having three states: solid, liquid, and gas. When matter is in a superfluid state, it behaves like a fluid without viscosity and with infinite thermal conductivity. Without friction, a superfluid can easily escape a container it is placed in. In the case of Cassiopeia A, this superfluid is allowing energy to escape the star much more rapidly, and is thus cooling the star.
Phytoplankton are small organisms that live in both fresh and salt water, and many of them are single-celled plants. That makes them too small to be seen individually with the naked eye. However, when there are enough of them in the water, it can give the water a green color. Large enough concentrations can even be seen by satellite.
Phytoplankton are important because they are responsible for half of the total amount of oxygen produced by all plant life. They are eaten by krill, which in turn are eaten by whales. Thus they are also important in the food chain.
NASA has used their MODIS satellite to look at the chlorophyll concentration, as well as the sea surface temperature from the coast of Maine up to Nova Scotia. The images show that more Phytoplankton are growing to the north in the cooler waters, rather than the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream. It is interesting to see that in both images, you can see the eddies formed by the Gulf Stream as it heads towards Europe.
These images show one of those rich mixing basins: the northwest Atlantic Ocean. Based on data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, these maps show the concentration of chlorophyll (top) and sea surface temperatures (bottom) in the region from August 29 to September 5, 2010.
After experiencing their warmest year on record, many of the southern and western areas of Greenland also had the longest number of days that snow melted. The snow melt in 2010 lasted lasted 50 days longer than the 1979-2009 average snow melt normally does. In the image to the right, areas in orange and red experienced longer snow melt days while areas in light blue had fewer snow melt days. Good luck finding the light blue areas. Unless you click on the image to make it larger, I doubt that you will be able to see them. Since the light blue areas occur at the very edges of the data, and since they occur right next to some of the highest snow melt days, I suspect that they may be artifacts in the data, and not true values.
Since this is fresh water that is melting, the seas around Greenland have a slight decrease in salinity. The melting of this snow may also increase global sea levels, although scientists do not know to what extent this will occur. Some scientists think that it could increase the global sea level by up to 0.6 meters or about two feet.
This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.
NASA has taken the extensive data from their MODIS satellites and created an impressive visualization of large fires across the world from 2002 to 2001, and combines it with snowfall and seasonal changes.
NASA is fairly well known for the many conceptual animations they produce to showcase upcoming launches and projects, and the latest Mars Rover “Curiosity” is no exception. This time, the animation was produced by California’s Bohemian Grey, and is available on the JPL website.
The latest issue of Scientific Computing has a great article from some NASA researchers on analyzing and visualizing airflow around landing gear, in hopes of redesigning them to reduce vibration and “aeroacoustic” effects (eg, Loud rumbling). If you see their “
Earlier today (2:41AM EDT), the sun kicked up a massive solar flare, and luckily NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the whole thing on film.
If you love ParaView and VTK, then you should definitely look at this newest press release from Kitware which discusses their recent SBIR win to develop some new features for massive parallelization, for use by NASA.
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