Rud-e-Gaz and Rud-e-Hara Wetlands

This image over a remote area in southern Iran was acquired by Japan’s ALOS satellite on 10 December 2009.

To the west we can see the waters of the Strait of Hormuz, which lies between the Gulf of Oman to the south and Persian Gulf to the north. The brown areas along the coast are sediments carried from rivers that flow only after erratic rainfall in the interior, usually in the winter months.

On the whole, the area pictured is extremely arid, as evident by the lack of vegetation. But in the upper left and slightly inland, we can see a green area that appears to be standing water from a human-made dam on the river.

The dark zones along the coast are wetlands at the deltas of the Rud-e-Gaz and Rud-e-Hara rivers. This extensive complex of tidal mudflats, creeks, salt marshes, mangroves, sandbanks and offshore islands is an important site for wintering waterbirds.

This is just one of the over 2000 sites worldwide considered to be wetlands of international importance by the Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental treaty for the sustainable use of wetlands.

Dedicated ESA programs assist the convention by providing satellite data to be used to monitor these important areas. With their repeating global coverage, satellites are ideal for imaging remote areas that require monitoring – like the wetland pictured here.

This picture is featured on the Earth from Space video program.

Image credit: JAXA/ESA

Palouse, Washington

Located south of Spokane, Washington, the Palouse is a rich farming area of some 7,000 square kilometers, reminiscent of Tuscany. But instead of vineyards, the main crops are wheat and rapeseed. The rolling hills of windblown silt (loess) cover up part of the Columbia Plateau basalt province. The image near Waitsburg was acquired July 24, 2008, covers an area of 27 by 30 km, and is located at 46.3 degrees north, 118.2 degrees west.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Paraná River Flooding

Map of flood extent on the Paraná River in northern Argentina near the border with Paraguay. Water bodies and surrounding wetland areas observed by the German TerraSAR-X satellite on 11 June 2008 are colored blue, while recently flooded areas imaged by Sentinel-1A on 15 June 2014 appear in red.

This map was produced following an activation of the International Charter Space and Major Disasters. More information.

The radar on Sentinel-1 is able to ‘see’ through clouds, rain and in darkness, making it particularly useful for monitoring floods. Images acquired before and after a flood offer immediate information on the extent of inundation and support assessments of property and environmental damage.

Image credit: ESA/DLR/CAEARTE/CONAE ML

Brazil

As football fans worldwide keep their eyes trained on Brazil, ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite captures the entire country in a single image.

The Andean Plateau, or Altiplano, of neighboring Bolivia, including Lake Titicaca and the giant Salar Uyuni salt flat, are visible towards the scene’s western edge.

Proba is smaller than a cubic meter but its view spans a mighty 2250 km. It reveals details 300 m across but the central part of the image is sharper – down to 100 m – as demonstrated in the right-hand image, which shows a detail of the River Negro joining the mighty River Amazon.

Proba-V is a miniaturized ESA satellite tasked with a full-scale mission: to map land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days.

The camera’s continent-spanning field of view collects light in the blue, red, near-infrared and mid-infrared wavebands, ideal for monitoring plant and forest growth as well as inland water bodies.

Proba’s images are processed and distributed to hundreds of scientific end users by VITO, Belgium’s Flemish Institute for Technological Research, extending the coverage of previous generations of the Vegetation camera flown on the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites.

Image credit: ESA/BELSPO

Southwestern Coast of Greenland

On the southwestern coast of Greenland, multiple ice streams that drain the Greenland ice sheet are pictured in this satellite image.

Covering more than 2,000,000 sq km, Greenland is the world’s largest island and home to the second largest ice sheet after Antarctica.

Scientists used data from Earth-observing satellites have discovered that the rate of ice sheet melting is increasing. Between 1992 and 2012, Greenland was responsible for adding about 7 mm to the average global sea level. Many areas in Greenland – especially along the coast – are losing up to one meter of ice thickness per year.

Melting ice sheets caused by rising temperatures and the subsequent rising of sea levels is a devastating consequence of climate change, especially for low-lying coastal areas.

In addition, the increased influx of freshwater into oceans affects the salinity, which in turn impacts global ocean currents – a major player in the regulating of our climate.

In the lower part of the image, we can see icebergs speckling the waters of a fjord, with the mountainous Nuussuaq Peninsula visible along the bottom of the image.

This image was acquired by Landsat-8 satellite’s Operational Land Imager on 12 June 2013.

Image credit: USGS/ESA

Flooding in Serbia

In May 2014, historic floods inundated Serbia and neighboring countries, causing major population displacements and property destruction. Several weeks after massive flood waters have mostly receded west of Belgrade, Serbia, the ground remains saturated and uninhabitable. In this satellite image, acquired June 8, 2014 by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft, wet ground and rivers are highlighted in red. Identification was based on colder temperatures seen in the thermal infrared bands. The image covers an area of 35 by 21 miles (57 by 34.5 kilometers), and is located at 44.7 degrees north, 20.1 degrees east.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Sea-Level Detail from CryoSat

Detail of sea-surface topography: red represents higher sea levels while blue areas are lower. The ‘strips’ are the CryoSat satellite’s ground tracks.

Image credit: ESA/CNES/CLS

Note: For more information, see 2013 Sea-Surface Topography.

Landslide in Mesa County, Colorado

On May 26, 2014, an enormous landslide came roaring from above in a sparsely inhabited area of Mesa County, Colorado, near the town of Collbran. Measuring more than 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) long, 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) wide and as deep as 260 feet (80 meters), the slide claimed three lives. This 3-D perspective view was created from an image acquired on June 6, 2014, by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. The vertical relief has been exaggerated two times. The slide is located at 39.1 degrees north, 107.9 degrees west.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Note: The original article mentioned that the landslide occurred in Arizona; however, this is incorrect as Mesa County is located in Colorado. I've corrected the article.

Lake Afrera, Ethiopia

Lake Afrera is a hypersaline lake located in the Danakil Depression in northern Ethiopia. Rock salt has been mined at the lake for centuries. More recently, some companies used to produce salt by pumping brine into artificial ponds for evaporation and subsequent precipitation. Following the 2011 eruption of nearby Nabro volcano, the lake is contaminated with sulfuric acid, making the salt inedible. The single island in the lake, Franchetti Island, is considered the lowest-lying island in the world. The image covers an area of 20 by 33 km, was acquired April 25, 2014, and is located at 13.3 degrees north, 40.9 degrees east.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Mount Kenya

Mount Kenya, the second-highest mountain in Africa, is pictured in this image from Japan’s ALOS satellite from 25 February 2011.

Standing just above 5000 m, this stratovolcano is one of many volcanoes in the East African Rift, an area where two tectonic plates are moving apart.

The mountain has 11 small glaciers but, like all glaciers on the high mountains of tropical Africa, they are rapidly retreating. Less snow accumulates during the winter than melts in the summer, and there is little to no formation of new ice. According to some predictions, there will no longer be any ice on the mountain in the next three decades.

The area around Mount Kenya is a national park protecting the biodiversity and forming an attractive destination for tourists, making it a key economic resource for the region. The area is home to monkeys, antelopes, elephants and leopards.

The Mount Kenya National Park and its natural forest has been an UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1997.

North of the mountain peak we can see a brown patchwork of fields, and a distinct line where the protected area ends and agriculture begins. In fact, a small portion of the park’s borders have fences and other barriers to keep animals within the reserve and off of the farmland.

In the upper right, there are large patches of light green, which are probably areas of failed agricultural development that now belong to the protected area.

Past threats from commercial tree plantations and other habitat destruction have been alleviated through long-term efforts, including the government’s policy of not converting any more natural forest for plantation development. But some areas that had been cleared but never planted are now colonized by grasses, and are being maintained as open grazing lands, rather than being allowed to revert to natural forest.

This image is featured on the Earth from Space video program.

Image credit: JAXA/ESA

Europe in May 2014

This image of Europe is a composite of Proba-V images from 1–10 May 2014. Launched just over a year ago, the washing machine-sized satellite carries the Vegetation imager designed after the French Spot-Vegetation mission, flown on the Spot-4 and Spot-5 satellites.

Spot-Vegetation marked 16 years of service in May, and has now passed the torch to its European counterpart.

Proba-V maps land cover and vegetation growth across the entire planet every two days. The data can also be used for day-by-day tracking of extreme weather, alerting authorities to crop failures, monitoring inland water resources, and tracing the steady spread of deserts and deforestation.

Image credit: ESA/VITO

Flooding in the Balkans

Sentinel-1A scan from 24 May 2014 over parts of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. The area used for the flood delineation mapping under the Copernicus Emergency Management Service is indicated in the red box. Read full article.

Image credit: ESA

Note: For more information, see Flood Map.

Lake Constance

The freshwater Lake Constance in Central Europe is pictured in this image from the Sentinel-1A satellite.

Formed by the Rhine Glacier during the last Ice Age, it covers an area of about 540 sq km and is an important source of drinking water for southwestern Germany.

The lake has shorelines in three countries: Germany to the north, Switzerland to the south and Austria at its eastern end. Over the water body, however, there are no borders because there is no legally binding agreement on where they lie.

In the lower-right, we can see where the Rhine river flows into the lake from the south, which then flows out of the lake to the west (left). This and other rivers carry sediments from the Alps, extending the coastline and decreasing the lake’s water depth.

The runways of Germany’s Friedrichshafen Airport are visible in the right section of the image. The Aviation & Aerospace Museum is nearby.

This image was acquired on 10 May in ‘interferometric wide swath mode’ and in dual polarization.

The radar instrument gathers information in either horizontal or vertical radar pulses, and colors were assigned to the different types. In this image, buildings generally appear pink, while vegetation is green. Areas with lowest reflectivity in all polarizations appear very dark, like the water.

Sentinel-1A’s radar is still being calibrated following its 3 April 2014 launch, but early images like this give us a glimpse of the kind of operational imagery that this mission will provide for Europe’s Copernicus environmental monitoring program.

This image is also featured on the Earth from Space video program.

Image credit: ESA