NASA's Dr. Jon Ranson is on an expedition in the forests of central Maine to validate recent radar and lidar measurements which will help create more accurate and sensitive sensors to better understand the vegetation of the Earth and to balance the carbon budget.

It takes work to maintain a satellite’s orbit. In the spring of 2009, mission controllers pilot NASA's Aqua satellite through a series of orbital maneuvers to correct the angle of the satellite’s flight path.

Following in Darwin's footsteps, NASA oceanographer Gene Feldman explores the remarkable Galapagos Islands.

Attempts of Renaissance astronomers to explain the puzzling path of planets across the night sky led to modern science’s understanding of gravity and motion.

In 1988, wildfires raced through Yellowstone National Park, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres. This series of Landsat images tracks the landscape’s slow recovery through 2008.

Earth would not be the planet that it is without its biosphere, the sum of its life. This series of images illustrates the variations in the average productivity of the global biosphere from 1999 to 2008.

In the early 1980s, scientists began to realize that CFCs were creating a thin spot—a hole—in the ozone layer over Antarctica every spring. This series of satellite images shows the ozone hole on the day of its maximum depth each year from 1979 through 2008.

The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. This series shows deforestation on the frontier in the northwestern part of the state between 2000 and 2008.

Because of differences in geography and climate, Antarctica sea ice extent is larger than the Arctic’s in winter and smaller in summer. Since 1979, Antarctica’s sea ice has increased slightly, but year-to-year fluctuations are large.

A massive irrigation project in the Kyzylkum Desert of central Asia has devastated the Aral Sea over the past 50 years. These images show the continued decline of the Southern Aral Sea in the past decade, as well as the first steps of recovery in the Northern Aral Sea in recent years.

NASA satellites have monitored Arctic sea ice since 1978. Starting in 2002, they observed a sharp decline in sea ice extent.

An international team of scientists used a state-of-the-art computer model to learn “what might have been” if ozone-destroying chemicals had not been banned through the 1989 Montreal Protocol.

Drought struck southern Utah in the early twenty-first century. The drought’s effects were easily seen in the fluctuating water levels of Lake Powell.

In the years following the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi residents began reclaiming the country’s nearly decimated Mesopotamian marshes. This series of images documents the transformation of the fabled landscape between 2000 and 2009.

Over the span of 11 years, the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes as magnetic field lines that are wound and tangled inside the Sun periodically break through to the surface. This series of images shows sunspots and UV brightness generated by solar magnetic activity from 1999-2009.

To expand the possibilities for beachfront tourist development, Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, undertook a massive engineering project to create hundreds of artificial islands along its Persian Gulf coastline.

Polar sea ice grows and shrinks dramatically each year, driven by seasonal cycles. Habitat for wildlife and harbinger of changing climate, sea ice offers scientists important clues about the state of our planet.

Lora Koenig, a remote-sensing glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, spent three dark, frigid months supporting research at the National Science Foundation’s Greenland Summit Camp. Near the end of her stay, Koenig emailed the Earth Observatory answers to a few questions…

Searching for alternative sources of energy for his country, one student turned to a NASA satellite to assess the feasibility of offshore wind power in Southeast Brazil.

Earth’s temperature depends on how much sunlight the land, oceans, and atmosphere absorb, and how much heat the planet radiates back to space. This fact sheet describes the net flow of energy through different parts of the Earth system, and explains how the planetary energy budget stays in…