The Earth Story

This cool visualisation by #NASA shows photosynthetic activity across North America during the growing season, which is of course coming to an end. During photosynthesis, plants absorb sun light, but also re-emit some of that light as a faint but measurable glow that is undetectable to human eyes.

Thanks to the capabilities of the Global Ozone Monitoring Instrument 2 (GOME-2) instrument on Metop-A, a European meteorological satellite, we are able to detect this faint fluorescence.

As you can imagine, it is difficult to distinguish between fluorescent signals from the vantage point of outer space, but luckily, photosynthetic vegetation has a unique spectral signature that can be isolated; a plant fingerprint, so to speak.

The pink glow in the satellite photo represents fluorescence measured from land plants in early July, from 2007 to 2011 and the magnitude of the glow indicates the amount of photosynthesis within a given region.

Impressive!

-Jean

For more information and an awesome video, head on over to NASA's site here:http://1.usa.gov/1iCDEjC

This awesome image consists of 3,888 photos taken from the same vantage point in Oslo, Norway, for a whole year. The images are stitched together, with each photo contained in a column only a pixel wide. In terms of calendar months, January is to the left and December to the right. Jean Photo by Eirik Solheim