Tom and I have been very busy this week, working with our team and with the folks here on station to build the infrastructure associated with our traverse platform. On top of the HMW sheets of plastic ...

We had another successful flight last night. Airborne science has taught me that a great flight is one that provides good data and a story, but a perfect flight offers a story from which we learn ...

UPDATE (October 3, 2014) – The answer to this puzzler was posted here. Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The September 2014 puzzler is above. Your challenge is to use ...

A 1960’s movie classic, “The Graduate” (1967), contains a scene where the young Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is given advice about his future by the worldly Mr. McGuire (Walter Brooke): Mr.

I have always wanted to visit Greenland, the “ground zero” for climate change. Its ice cap rises more than 3,200 meters (2 miles!) above sea level and it holds so much ice that if it all melted, the ...

I had the good fortune to join the crew of the NOAA P-3 “hurricane hunter” plane that flew into Harvey on 25 Aug 2017 shortly before it made landfall in Texas. We made six pairs of eyewall ...

Paro Taktsang, “The Tiger’s Nest,” outside Paro Bhutan. Credit: Tim Mayer. After five connecting flights—8,000+ miles and over 40 hours of traveling—our flight descended into the “Land of the Thunder ...

I’m writing this post on our last day in St. Mary’s, Alaska. This tiny village of about 560 inhabitants had its surroundings ravaged by two large tundra fires in the summer of 2022. The East Fork fire ...

On a warm July morning an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) quadcopter rises up through a gap in the tall, dense deciduous forest canopy at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in ...

Update on August 19, 2025: This Landsat 8 image shows Múlajökull, a surge-type piedmont glacier in central Iceland bordered by colorful lakes. Congratulations to Kim Jack for being the first reader to ...

Update: This Landsat 9 image shows an island group and its surrounding waters off mainland Mozambique. Congratulations to Mark for being the first reader to identify the location and to Yaakov ...

As we head into the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, now is a good time to reflect on the accomplishments achieved by CYGNSS since its launch in December 2016. Early mission operations focused on ...