NASA: California Just Saw its Greatest Year-Over-Year Water Gains in 2 Decades After years of intense drought and diminishing groundwater, California just saw its greatest year-over-year water gains in two decades, according to data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellite mission, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). This past winter’s bonanza of atmospheric rivers alleviated some of the water deficit that the […] SnowBrains | June 12, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: California’s Largest Reservoir at Highest Level in 4 Years, Almost 100% Full Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir, filled to nearly 100 percent capacity in May 2023, reaching levels not seen for four years. Since 2019, a prolonged period of extreme drought resulted in dwindling reservoir levels. In the early months of 2023, heavy rains and meltwater from an above-average mountain snowpack caused a notable turnaround. Related: NASA Satellite Chronicles the Return of […] SnowBrains | June 7, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: A Smoky May for North America For remote sensing scientists who track the movement of smoke plumes, May 2023 has been a wild, memorable month due to extreme fire activity in northwestern Canada. Related: NASA: Smoke Fills North American Skies Early spring always brings elevated fire risk to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the northeastern edge of British Columbia—naturally dry areas that lie in the rain shadow of […] Fire Firebrains | May 29, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: Summer Temperatures Arrive Early A springtime heatwave has made large swaths of western North America feel like the dog days of summer. In mid-May 2023, western Washington and Oregon, along with much of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, were in the throes of a record-breaking streak of hot weather. While the most unseasonably warm weather subsided by May 16, above-average temperatures were projected to […] Weather SnowBrains | May 18, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: Smoke Fills North American Skies Raging fires filled the skies of southern Canada and the northern United States with smoke in mid-May 2023. The fires had scorched 478,000 hectares (1,800 square miles) in Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan as of May 16, which is ten times the average area burned for this time of year. Related: Over 100 Wildfires Force Tens of Thousands of People […] Fire Firebrains | May 17, 2023 0 Comments
NASA Images: The Canadian Rockies While orbiting western Montana, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured this photograph of the northern Rocky Mountains, also known as the Canadian Rockies. The Rockies are North America’s largest mountain range, sprawling approximately 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles) long and nearly 650 kilometers (400 miles) wide at certain points. The Rocky Mountains extend from British Columbia, Canada, southeast toward […] SnowBrains | April 25, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: California Superbloom – A Parade of Poppies A bright spot has emerged after California’s particularly wet and dreary winter: a sea of wildflowers in Southern California. In the western tip of the Mojave Desert, orange, gold, and yellow flowers have flooded the valleys and hills of Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. Related: NASA: Deluge of Snow and Rain Produces California Superblooms On April 7, 2023, the Operational […] SnowBrains | April 19, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: Precipitation Piles on in California Two successive atmospheric rivers hit California in March 2023, bearing rain, snow, and strong winds. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power as the storm toppled trees, unleashed mudslides, and flooded streets. Related: Atmospheric Rivers: How They Work, and How El Niño and La Niña Affect Them The clouds parted on March 16, allowing the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) […] WeatherBrains | March 20, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: Blizzard Warnings and Snow Replace Sunshine and Warmth in Southern California A powerful late-February storm brought blizzard warnings, cold rains, howling winds, and rare low-elevation snow to parts of southern California more accustomed to warmth and sun. The Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9 acquired this image (top) of snow blanketing much of the San Gabriel Mountains in areas north of Los Angeles on February 26, 2023. The other image […] SnowBrains | February 28, 2023 1 Comment
NASA: Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf Finally Breaks In February 2019, a rift spanning most of the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica appeared ready to spawn an iceberg about twice the size of New York City. The question among scientists was not if the growing rift would finish traversing the shelf and break but when? Now, nearly four years later, it has done just that. Related: Colorado Fourth […] SnowBrains | January 25, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: Weather Whiplash – What Caused the Recent Flip From Extreme Cold to Unseasonably Warm In late December, many Americans reached for cold-weather gear as a blast of unusually cold Arctic air poured south and fueled a travel nightmare around Christmas. In Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, a “bomb cyclone” formed along the cold front bearing powerful winds and whiteout conditions. In certain parts of upstate New York and Canada, lake effect snow […] Weather WeatherBrains | January 5, 2023 0 Comments
NASA: The Freezing Snowy Nightmare Before Christmas Santa Claus better bundle and buckle up. Forecasters are warning that a blast of Arctic air will bring dangerously cold conditions to parts of Canada and the central and eastern U.S. in the days before Christmas 2022. The map above shows the surface air temperature anomalies forecasted for December 23, 2022. It was produced by combining satellite observations with temperatures […] Weather WeatherBrains | December 22, 2022 0 Comments
NASA: La Niña 3 Times – Looking at This Relatively Weak but Unusually Prolonged Event In December 2022, Earth was in the grips of La Niña—an oceanic phenomenon characterized by the presence of cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. The current La Niña, relatively weak but unusually prolonged, began in 2020 and has returned for its third consecutive northern hemisphere winter, making this a rare “triple-dip” event. Other triple-dip La Niña’s […] Weather WeatherBrains | December 8, 2022 0 Comments
NASA: Phytoplankton May Be Abundant Under Antarctic Sea Ice A decade ago, scientists on a NASA-sponsored ocean expedition found massive populations of phytoplankton blooming beneath sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Now scientists using underwater instruments and a NASA satellite have found evidence of potentially significant blooms beneath the sea ice encircling Antarctica. The findings were recently published in the scientific journal Frontiers. Phytoplankton is to the ocean what […] Brains SnowBrains | November 29, 2022 0 Comments
Mount Terror: The 10,000-Foot Antarctic Volcano This article originally appeared on nasa.gov Mount Terror might sound like a place to avoid. But this Antarctic volcano is not as terrifying as its name implies. From a geological perspective, the mountain itself is relatively benign. It is a shield volcano located on the eastern side of Ross Island and consists of numerous pyroclastic cones and lava domes. But […] Brains SnowBrains | November 4, 2022 0 Comments
NASA’s DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-Ever Planetary Defense Test After 10 months of flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target on Monday, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space. Related: Friday 13th, 2029 – The Day a Huge Asteroid Dubbed ‘God of Chaos’ Will Fly Underneath Our TV Satellites Mission […] Brains SnowBrains | September 27, 2022 0 Comments
NASA: All Eyes on the Snow as Water Supplies Dwindle As the American West suffers a 22-year-long “megadrought” that researchers say is the worst in at least 1,200 years, water managers now have a new level of insight into just how much water will be available for their communities. Water departments in the West are using maps and models originally created by a NASA team to help track water and […] SnowBrains | September 26, 2022 0 Comments
NASA: Smoky Fires Rage in the Northwest The scorching weather of summer 2022 has left much of the Northwestern United States primed to burn with wildland fires. In early September, the northern Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range billowed with smoke that was slowly wafting across the continental U.S. and southern Canada. Related: [VIDEO] Big Bear Ski Area, CA, Employees Fire Up Snowguns to Slow Encroaching Wildfire […] Fire Firebrains | September 12, 2022 1 Comment
NASA: Late Season Melting in Greenland – Most on Record for Any September In September 2022, vast areas atop the Greenland ice sheet melted. Some scientists think the widespread late-season melting—the most on record for any September—could have implications for the ice sheet next year. Greenland’s melting season typically runs from May to early September. The 2022 season started slowly, as lower-than-average air temperatures in May and June culminated in the least amount […] SnowBrains | September 9, 2022 1 Comment
NASA: A Half-Century of Ice Loss in Northwest Greenland A pair of satellite images acquired almost 50 years apart reveals striking changes to the glaciers and ice caps in northwest Greenland. Few other satellite comparisons span this much time, especially in such vivid lifelike color. Related: NASA: Record Summer Melting Across Svalbard, Arctic Circle Observations of Earth from space are now common. But prior to the 1970s, no Earth-observing […] SnowBrains | August 30, 2022 1 Comment
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