The most complete view ever assembled of the world's air pollution has been produced by NASA's Terra spacecraft. For the first time, policymakers and scientists now have a way to identify the major sources of air pollution and can closely track where the pollution goes, anywhere on Earth.

New space-based maps of buildings and paved surfaces provide urban planners with insights into city growth and rainfall runoff impacts on water quality. The new maps based on Landsat 7 data were presented at the AGU meeting in Boston this week.

The springtime ozone peaks at high northern latitudes are caused by the long-range transport of air pollution and not by natural processes in the atmosphere. Scientists presented new findings from an airborne experiment at the AGU meeting in Boston this week.

A new analysis of vegetation growth in North America using satellite observations indicates a significant increase in the rate at which carbon is being taken up by plants. The study was presented at the AGU meeting in Boston this week. (University of Colorado release)

Windblown desert dust can choke rain clouds, cutting rainfall hundreds of miles away. This new discovery, made with the help of NASA satellites, suggests that droughts over arid regions are made worse by damaging land and livestock management that expand the desert. The new study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.