The snowy landscape of the Putoransky state nature reserve, a Unesco world heritage site in the central area of the Putorana Plateau in northern central Siberia. The site, about 100km north of the Arctic Circle, serves as a major reindeer migration route – an increasingly rare natural phenomenon – and is one of the very few centres of plant species richness in the Arctic. Virtually untouched by human influence, this isolated mountain range includes pristine forests and cold-water lake and river systems. The lakes are characterised by elongated, fjord-like shapes, such as lake Ayan in the upper-central part of the image. Zooming in on the lake we can see that it is mostly ice-covered, with small patches of water peeking through around its lower reaches. Another feature of this area are the flat-topped mountains, formed by a geological process called ‘plume volcanism’: a large body of magma seeped through Earth’s surface and formed a blanket of basalt kilometres thick. Over time, cracks in the rock filled with water and eroded into the rivers and lakes we see today.
Once clouds have cleared away, the effects of major storms can often be viewed from space for days and weeks. This photograph shows roughly 20km (12 miles) of coastline and islands on the northwest coast of Australia. The tan and white swirls in the sea are sediments that washed out after an unusual rainfall event during the dry season. Rain fell inland about five days before this image was taken, and the sediment was channelled down local rivers and out into Collier Bay. Long, narrow patches of sediment also show the direction of the local ocean current, which runs from east to west (lower right to upper left). The biggest islands – Traverse and Woninjaba – have the biggest sediment patches. The Kimberly region of Western Australia is so remote that boat and helicopter are the usual means of moving through this wilderness area. Tourists are drawn to the natural beauty of the mountainous scenery.
Fall in northern Sweden is a brief but spectacular affair. For a few weeks in October, alpine forests in this remote part of Swedish Lapland turn blazing shades of yellow and orange. Birch forests growing along stream valleys are probably the source of most of the colour, though other deciduous shrubs and understory plants surely contribute as well. Some of the hills have a dusting of snow. The southern sun’s low angle above the horizon draws long, dark shadows across the landscape. In Lapland, the local name for leaf peeping season is ruska, the time of year when Scandinavians head outdoors to savour nature’s display before the long, dark winter descends.
This image of Hurricane Matthew shows the massive storm converging on the Florida coast
On 4 October, Hurricane Matthew made landfall on south-western Haiti as a category-4 storm – the strongest storm to hit the Caribbean nation in more than 50 years – bringing 145mph winds and torrential rains that killed almost 900 inhabitants, destroyed thousands of homes, displaced tens of thousands of people, ruined plantations and drowned animals.
Earlier on 4 October, temperature data collected by Modis on Nasa’s Aqua satellite revealed that the cloud tops around Matthew were very cold (at least -57C). Cold cloud tops are known to produce heavy rainfall. The National Hurricane Center called for 380 to 500mm of rain in southern Haiti and in the south-western Dominican Republic.
October is a month of transition for weather patterns over the Arabian Sea. In the summer, winds blow from the sea toward land. In the winter, the winds reverse and blow over the Arabian Sea from the northeast. During October, between the summer and winter monsoons, the prevailing wind direction varies. This image on 26 October shows northeasterly winds blowing dust plumes off the coast of Iran and Pakistan.
The Chinese city of Shanghai is the country’s most populous city – with over 24 million people. It is also the site of the world’s busiest container ports owing to its strategic location on the Yangtze river delta. If we take a closer look at the Yangtze along the top of the image, we can see multiple ships in its waters, as well as in the smaller tributary – the Huangpu river – flowing through the city centre. Shanghai’s famous skyline is located on a peninsula on the east side of the river near the centre of the image. What was mainly farmland and countryside until about two decades ago is now home to Shanghai’s skyscrapers, including the Oriental Pearl Tower. Another noticeable feature in this area are the brightly coloured rooftops of housing projects in red and blue. The city’s historic centre sits on the opposite side of the Huangpu River, appearing darker in colour owing to its dense population. Half of Shanghai’s residents live in this district. The Sentinel-2 mission monitors our changing lands and cities, tracking urban expansion to assist urban planners to ensure the sustainable management of densely populated areas.
In remote Rupert Bay in northern Quebec the majesty of fluid dynamics is regularly on display. With several rivers pouring into this nook of James Bay, the collision of river and sea water combines with the churn of tides and the motion of currents past islands to make swirls of colourful fluid. As they wind through the boreal forests and wetlands of Northern Quebec, the rivers that flow into Rupert Bay often carry water stained brown with tannins and lignins – chemical substances found in plants and soil that can leach into the water and give it a yellow, brown, or even black colour. (The same process gives tea its dark colour.) This image captured tannin-stained (dark brown) river water flowing into the bay at the same time that turbid seawater appeared to be pushing in due to the rising tide. Note that the coloured plumes and intricate vortices around the islands are pointing inland indicating that the tide was likely coming in or that northwesterly winds were affecting the flow of the water.
Myriad, overlapping river channels distinguish what is known in Australia as the Channel Country. This photograph of northwest Queensland shows the channels flowing south toward lake Eyre. The floodplain includes hundreds of channels, as the Georgina, Burke, and Hamilton rivers merge into the very broad floodplain of Eyre creek (more than 30km across). Landscapes in the Channel Country are generally very flat and drainage is poor, which encourages wetlands to form. The densest vegetation and the concentrated channels form a semi-permanent wetland at the meeting point of the rivers. These wide Australian floodplains are unique on the planet. Scientists think they are caused by the extreme variation in water and sediment discharges from the local rivers. In many years there is no rainfall at all, so these rivers are effectively non-existent. In years of modest rainfall, the main channels will carry water, with some neighbouring channels carrying minor floodwater. (That water can remain for months in narrow waterholes known as billabongs.) But every few decades, the floodplain needs to carry extremely high discharges of water. These heavy floods come from tropical storms to the north and can inundate the entire width of the floodplain. On such occasions, the floodplain appears as series of brown water surfaces with only tree tops indicating the location of the islands.
New Delhi’s geometric patterns – designed by British architects Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker – contrast sharply with Old Delhi (top) and eastern Delhi (right). The Rajpath (King’s Way) is a wide boulevard that links the hexagonal India Gate Circle with the Rashtrapati Bhavan (president’s house) to the left. A third landmark, Connaught Circus, creates the northern point of an equilateral triangle.
A heavy blanket of smoke filled the air south of the Himalayas as dozens of actively burning fires speckled the landscape in northwest India in mid-October. Most of the red hotspots, which mark actively burning fires, cluster in the state of Punjab. Known as India’s “bread basket”, Punjab is a rich agricultural region, growing about 20% of wheat produced in India and 10% of the rice. Many farmers use fire to clear leftover plant debris and ready fields for the next plantings, a practice known as stubble or paddy burning. The smoke contains particulates and chemical compounds which are respiratory irritants and can damage the health of people and livestock. In some areas of the world the smoke from agricultural fires disperses over a wide area, minimizing the effect in any one locale. In northwest India, however, the tall Himalaya mountains form a formidable barrier to smoke dispersion, resulting in heavy layers of thick smoke hanging over the valleys south of the mountains. In this image the smoke east of the Punjab region is so thick that the ground is obscured from view.
Strong winds kick up a spectacular dust storm off of Alaska, with northerly winds blowing dust from the Copper river delta. The iron- and feldspar-rich dust has been created by the grinding of glaciers against underlying bedrock and appears grey and grainy in this image. The silty powder is also called “glacial flour” or “rock flour” and can find its way into rivers and lakes, especially during springtime snow melt when the water levels are high. Glacial flour in flowing rivers can be carried far downstream before settling out on dry land when river levels drop. Once dry, the flour can be easily lifted by winds and carried long distances. The Copper river forms a broad delta, about 80 km wide, where the waters flow into the Gulf of Alaska. Glacial flour accumulates along the course of the river, as well as in the delta, making the valley a rich source of spectacular dust storms.
Autumn in New Hampshire, US. A range of plant life, changing temperatures, and varying sun exposure contribute to these striking colour differences over a 10-day period.
The Galapagos Islands are situated in the remote Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 km from Ecuador. Their geography and location at the confluence of three ocean currents create a unique and biodiverse environment – both on land and underwater. The islands first became famous after Charles Darwin visited in 1835 and created his theory of evolution by natural selection after studying the unique adaptation of species to various environmental niches found on the islands. The Galapagos archipelago is made up of 127 islands, islets, and rocks, 19 of which are large and only four inhabited. The islands are volcanic in origin and the volcanic processes of island formation are continual. Isabela and Fernandina Islands are young islands, less than one million years old. The oldest islands are aged somewhere between three and five million years old. Wolf Volcano, located on the northern end of the reversed-L-shaped Isabella Island and straddling the equator, is an active volcano. The rocky nature of the islands can be seen in the large amount of greys and tans in the landscape. Bright green vegetation is evident, particularly inland. The largest four islands seen in this image are, from west to east: Fernandina, Isabela, Santiago, and Puerto Ayora.
September 2016 was the warmest September in 136 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. This map of the September 2016 LOTI (land-ocean temperature index) anomaly, shows that much of the warmer temperatures occurred in the northern hemisphere.
The record-warm September means 11 of the past 12 consecutive months dating back to October 2015 have set new monthly high-temperature records. Updates to the input data have meant that June 2016, previously reported to have been the warmest June on record, is, in GISS’s updated analysis, the third warmest June behind 2015 and 1998 after receiving additional temperature readings from Antarctica. The late reports lowered the June 2016 anomaly by 0.05 degrees Celsius to 0.75.
“Monthly rankings are sensitive to updates in the record, and our latest update to mid-winter readings from the South Pole has changed the ranking for June,” said GISS director Gavin Schmidt. “We continue to stress that while monthly rankings are newsworthy, they are not nearly as important as long-term trends.”
Large chunks of broken ice float in east-central Kazakhstan’s Alakol lake. This salt lake usually freezes for about two months at the end of winter, and breaks up in early spring – as we can see happening here. The lake’s mineral-rich water and mud is considered to be therapeutic, and tourists often visit the lake’s northern shores to remedy skin ailments. Alakol means ‘multicoloured lake’ – and we can clearly see varying shades of green and blue depending on the depth, sediments flowing in from rivers and streams and phytoplankton. The two smaller, shallower lakes to the northwest are Kosharkol and Sasykkol. The Alakol–Sasykkol lake system is both a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance and a Unesco biosphere reserve. It is an important migratory stop and nesting area for a variety of water birds, including the Dalmatian pelican and greater flamingo.
The Chesapeake and Ohio canal runs for 297km from Georgetown in Washington, DC, to Cumberland, Maryland, generally following along the north bank of the Potomac river. Constructed over a span of 22 years starting in 1828, the canal historically played an important role in transporting goods, primarily coal. The canal, towpath, and surviving system of locks and structures, are now a national historic park. This image shows the stretch between Hancock and Cumberland, Maryland. where one of the more infamous delays occurred in building the canal, near Paw Paw, West Virginia. Here the Potomac takes on a sinuous shape (seen in the centre of the image). Meanders along the rivers and streams in this region are not uncommon but the Paw Paw bends curve to such a degree that engineers determined they would save 10km of canal by bypassing four of the bends incised deep in the bedrock. They decided instead to route the canal through the ravine of a tributary, and then excavate through shale rock to construct a 950-meter-long tunnel (3,118ft), the largest structure along the canal. Work started in 1836 and was completed 14 years later, 12 years longer than first planned.
Oil fires, gas flares, and fires across the Middle East, seen as red hotspots in the image. Hotspots can be caused by a variety of heat sources– hotspots combined with grey smoke indicate an actively burning vegetation fire. Several such fires can be seen in the northern section of the image, scattered in the light green areas of Turkey and northern Iran. Further south, thick, oily-black smoke, typical of oil fires, rises from a number of hotspots north of Thertar Lake in Iran, where a number of oil wells and storage facilities are located. Oil fires have significant impact on human health and the environment, and have become all too common in oil-rich regions suffering violent conflicts. These fires cluster northwest in an area where war rages as Iraqi Security Forces and an International Coalition (CJTR-OIH) attempt to retake the area from Isis. Oil facilities have become targets in war, and also can be unintentionally damaged. In the south of the image, small hotspots can be seen aligned in a linear fashion north of the Persian Gulf. There is no visible smoke from these hotspots. While it is difficult to know for certain, these are likely gas flares. These are flames produced by a device that allows the burning off of flammable gas produced by pressure relief valves or planned, controlled, combustion. Such fires burn in small areas, do not spread (as natural fires would as they consume fuel) and produce almost no smoke.
