Swimming in the Clouds
Clouds are visible bodies of very fine water droplets or ice particles suspended in the atmosphere. The origin of term “cloud” can be found in the old english clod or clud, meaning a hill or a mass of rock. Around the beginning of the 13th century the term cloud was then intended as a metaphor to include rain clouds as masses of evaporated water
Kamchatka: the land of volcanoes
Kamchatka is a peninsula located in the far east of Russia basically known for hosting a considerable number of glacier and stratovolcano, most of them with no activity in the last century. A stratovolcano is built up by many layers of hardened lava and volcanic ash characterized by periodic effusive and explosive eruptions. Around 300
Etna outbreak
In the middle of March mount Etna has been systematically erupting for several days. The first eruption has been recorded on Wednesday March 15th (11:30 am local time) and the activity has spread until a second outbreak on Saturday, with a series of pyroclastic flows, up to the next Monday (March 20th). A few persons got
Dead Sea and thermal inertia
Sentinel 3-A SLSTR thermal bands allow us to have an excerpt on the phenomenon of thermal inertia and heat transfer involving the land masses and oceans on our Planet. The thermal inertia is the propensity of heat to transfer between two different materials or bodies. Indeed each material has a different specific heat capacity (namely
Chile on Fire
Some days ago Chile has faced the worst forest fire in its history (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2017/jan/25/chile-wildfire-worst-ever-in-pictures). First fires have been detected on January 19th, south off Santiago, and up to January 24th they spread southward, destroying more than 600 sq miles of land with thousands of people evacuated from their homes. Sentinel 3-A mission managed to
Larsen C
Larsen C is the remaining part of the giant Larsen Ice Shelf belonging to Antarctic Peninsula. Its extension is around 68400 km^2 and it is distant around 2000 km far from the southern part of South America. In the last years one of the largest Iceberg ever discovered is breaking from the ice shelf: its size
Synergy Storm
This Atlantic Ocean storm, south to Greenland, has been caught both by S1-B and S3-A on December 6th and 7th. Here below the S1-SAR image in interferometric wide swath mode, followed by S3-OLCI RGB (bands 10-6-3) and S3-SLSTR thermal (band 9) images. The OLCI image is the last of the duty cycle, before the eclipse period, indeed
Amazon river estuary
Two different images of Amazon river mouth. The RGBs are processed from two different observations of two different Sentinel 3-A instruments: October 20th per OLCI (RGB bands 10-6-3) and November 20th for SLSTR (RGB 5-3-1 band composition). The Amazon river carries the world’s greatest water data flow (more than any other river) and it is
Himalaya to India
One of the first published images (publishing started on November 17th) of Sentinel-3A SLSTR L1 NRT products. Those images are mosaics composed by three consecutive SLSTR products. The first image is an RGB composition of three bands: 0.555, 0.865 and 1.61 µm, where only the first band belongs to the visible spectrum (the other ones