Your weatherperson's job just got a little easier, thanks to new data available from advanced weather instruments aboard NASA's Aqua satellite.

Middle school students participating in NASA's International Space Station (ISS) EarthKAM education program will help scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center study Earth's changing surface by taking pictures from the ISS April 29-May 2. ISS EarthKAM is an educational program in which students control, via Internet connections, a high-resolution digital camera operating on the International Space Station's Destiny science module.

Researchers found surprising evidence of sea salt and frozen plankton in high, cold, cirrus clouds, the remnants of Hurricane Nora, over the U.S. plains states. Although the 1997 hurricane was a strong eastern Pacific storm, her high ice-crystal clouds extended many miles inland, carrying ocean phenomena deep into the U.S. heartland.

In honor of the Earth Day celebration, NASA scientists unveiled the first consistent and continuous global measurements of Earth's "metabolism." Data from the Terra and Aqua satellites are helping scientists frequently update maps of the rate at which plant life on Earth is absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere.

Bird-watching hikes near south San Francisco Bay, a street fair and a talk about historical ecosystems of the south bay are activities in which employees can take part to celebrate Earth Day April 22 through April 23 at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

Secondary and college classrooms are invited to explore the frozen ice sheets of the North Pole through live webcasts on April 21 and 24 with scientists from NASA and Native American students from the Bay Mills Community College in Brimley, Mich. The team will be gathering data about the nature and thickness of the sea ice on a moving ice floe and measuring the concentration of aerosols or pollutants in the Arctic under the AERONET (Aerosol Robotic Network) program with NASA scientist Brent Holben.

In early 2002, a patch of "black water" spanning over 60 miles in diameter formed off southwestern Florida and contributed to severe coral reef stress and death in the Florida Keys. The "black water" contained a high abundance of toxic and non-toxic microscopic plants.

Swirling waters off southern California will be studied by NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) this month. These coastal eddies can be important in bringing nutrients from deep to surface waters where they provide stimulus for ocean plant growth. Eddies can transport pollutants that originated on land, recirculating this material for several days. This may have both good and bad consequences for life in the ocean.

An Earth-monitoring instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite is keeping a close eye on a potential glacial disaster-in-the-making in Peru's spectacular, snow-capped Cordillera Blanca (White Mountains), the highest range of the Peruvian Andes.

NASA scientists will visit Spain April 10 through 12 to search for drilling sites where later this fall they plan to look for exotic life forms that may live underground near the Rio Tinto, a river in southwestern Spain.

Scientists using NASA satellite data have found the most intense global pollution from fires occurred during droughts caused by El Niño. The most intense fires took place in 1997- 1998 in association with the strongest El Niño event of the 20th century.

NASA scientists are developing a new planning and scheduling system for Earth observation satellites (EOS), designed to acquire and integrate data from multiple complementary Earth-sensing instruments, enabling them to build complex models of the Earth's ecosystem.