Three current storms captured by a NASA satellite show how unusual sea temperatures are creating a clear corridor in the Atlantic for more severe storms. The storms?tropical storms Harvey and Hilary and Hurricane Bert?are being powered by abnormally warm Atlantic sea-surface temperatures and cold Pacific waters, said Timothy Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

A NASA research aircraft will fly over selected U.S. forests this month with an innovative laser instrument to find out for the first time just how much vegetation is in these forests. When this technology is launched into space next year aboard the Vegetation Canopy Lidar spacecraft, it will create the first global maps of forest vegetation.

Scanning 5,000 data points per second, a NASA aircraft will fly over the beaches of North Carolina to survey changes from Hurricane Dennis' pounding of the shore for more than a week. The laser topographic mapping instrument can map in a day what would take more than a month using traditional surveying methods, said Bill Krabill of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility.

After soaring into space last spring, NASA's latest Earth-imaging satellite has completed its checkout phase and is now "open for business." New images from the Landsat 7 spacecraft are now available for viewing and purchase by scientific researchers and the general public via the Internet from the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA.

A NASA satellite instrument is keeping an eye on an iceberg the size of Rhode Island, the first time this space technology has been used to track a potential threat to international shipping. NASA's new orbiting SeaWinds radar instrument, flying aboard the QuikScat satellite, will monitor Iceberg B10A, which snapped off Antarctica seven years ago and has since drifted into a shipping lane. The massive iceberg measures about 24 miles by 48 miles and extends about 300 feet above water and may reach as deep as 1,000 feet below the ocean's surface.

The severity of hurricane seasons can be predicted by studying the influence of the El Ni�o weather pattern, concludes a study by Robert Wilson of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The study also found that one consequence of El Ni�o is less hurricane development in the Atlantic Ocean in years when El Nino is not present.

Researchers at the University of Montana have developed a new tool to identify areas first affected by a lack of rainfall and keep watch on regions that have been hardest hit by this summer's record-breaking drought. The "drought map" relates ground surface temperature with a measurement of vegetation greenness across the United States. Hot surfaces tell scientists where areas are succumbing to drought.