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Counting wildfires across the globe
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Image: Firefighters in Greece are battling a rapidly spreading wildfire that has swept across several neighbourhoods in Athens, Greece, on Monday. Thousands of residents have been evacuated as the massive fire reached the suburbs of Athens, with some flames reaching heights of 25 m.
This image shows the fires surrounding Athens on 12 August 2024, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. This image has been processed in a way that highlights vegetation in red, while the burned areas can be seen in black. The estimated affected area exceeds 100 sq km.
In response to the fires, the Copernicus Emergency Management Service was activated to cover the fire event affecting the Attica Region. Copernicus EMS Rapid Mapping was requested to provide an initial rough estimate, as well as emergency mapping of the fire’s extent and damage assessment.
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission is based on a constellation of two identical satellites, each carrying an innovative wide swath high-resolution multispectral imager with 13 spectral bands for monitoring changes in Earth’s land and vegetation.
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By NASA
Learn Home GLOBE Alumna and Youth for… Earth Science Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Stories Science Activation Highlights Citizen Science 4 min read
GLOBE Alumna and Youth for Habitat Program Lead Named Scientist of the Month in Alaska
As a 16-year old high school graduate, Maggie House decided to leave the military base in Germany where she lived with her family and go to college close to nature in Fairbanks, Alaska. She had lived in many countries and US states and knew she was ready. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks Troth Yeddha’ campus in Fall 2022, Maggie enrolled in a 300-level Watershed Management course, which required all students to implement a Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) project and poster. Maggie’s project focused on using the GLOBE Observer App to monitor the erosion of nearby Cripple Creek, which had a history of mining and made Fairbanks famous for its gold. She and a classmate wrote a funded mini-grant proposal to study how ice was related to erosion. While not on the frozen creek, Maggie worked as a student employee with the NASA Science Activation Program’s Arctic and Earth STEM Integrating GLOBE and NASA (SIGNs) team at the International Arctic Research Center, during which she trained teachers and mentored students at Alaska’s first-ever Student Research Symposium in 2022. Maggie also wrote an article about the symposium, published on the University of Alaska Fairbanks News page: https://www.uaf.edu/news/alaskan-youth-present-research-earth-day-symposium.php
When the ice melted and the symposium ended, Maggie wanted to study the freshwater habitats of the Creek using GLOBE hydrosphere protocols, so she wrote another proposal. Maggie got a full scholarship and grant funding through Biomedical Learning and Student Training (BLaST), supported by the National Institutes of Health. Her work earned recognition in the US Fish and Wildlife Service story, “Natural Flows Return to Cripple Creek” and honors as the December 2023/January 2024 BLaST Scientist of the Month. The story does not stop there. In May, 2024, Maggie House graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree and received the first-ever GLOBE internship at the Fairbanks Soil and Water Conservation District, where Maggie House leads the summer Youth for Habitat program for middle school students. Today, you can find Maggie in Cripple Creek near Fairbanks, Alaska, teaching students to learn science by doing science.
“I have a firm belief that the health of our environment is intertwined with the health of humans. I am interested in making science-related issues more understandable, for everyone to be a part of their local community. In my future, I see myself continuing to work towards strengthening the relationship between humans and nature and promoting the conservation of our dependence on one another.” – Maggie House
Arctic and Earth SIGNs created the conditions for Maggie as an undergraduate student to collect OpenSource GLOBE data that contributed to local solutions, to be awarded funding to pursue actionable research, and to be a leader for educators and future learners. Maggie’s data on ice conditions informed the engineering redesign of the Cripple Creek stream restoration project. Her success in using GLOBE protocols and culturally responsive research methods modeled by Arctic and Earth SIGNs gave her the confidence to write a research proposal and be awarded a full undergraduate research scholarship. Maggie was the first person in the world to monitor aquatic invertebrates in Cripple Creek just three weeks after flow was restored to the creek after 85 years. In Arctic and Earth SIGNs, environmental stewardship is a culminating part of the Learning Framework. Now, Maggie leads the stewardship of salmon habitat in Cripple Creek and mentors middle school youth to pursue STEM fields as a GLOBE trainer and mentor. Maggie’s story matters because one person, with a Science Activation support network and a focus on real-world environmental issues, can make a difference.
Arctic & Earth SIGNs is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNX16AC52A and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn
NASA Science Activation Program participant alumna Maggie House leads youth in GLOBE macroinvertebrate identification at an intergenerational workshop in June, 2024, using a microscope she purchased with her grant funds. Christi Buffington Share
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Last Updated Jul 30, 2024 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
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NASA’s ECOSTRESS instrument on June 19 recorded scorching roads and sidewalks across Phoenix where contact with skin could cause serious burns in minutes to seconds, as indicated in the legend above. NASA/JPL-Caltech Roads and sidewalks in some areas get so hot that skin contact could result in second-degree burns.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have mapped scorching pavement in Phoenix where contact with skin — from a fall, for example — can cause serious burns. The image shows land surface temperatures across a grid of roads and adjacent sidewalks, revealing how urban spaces can turn hazardous during hot weather.
Data for this visualization of the Phoenix area — the fifth most populous city in the United States — was collected at 1:02 p.m. local time on June 19, 2024, by a NASA instrument aboard the International Space Station. Called ECOSTRESS (short for the Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station), the instrument measures thermal infrared emissions from Earth’s surface.
The Image shows how miles of asphalt and concrete surfaces (colored here in yellow, red, and purple, based on temperature) trap heat. The surfaces registered at least 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius) to the touch — hot enough to cause contact burns in minutes to seconds.
The image also shows cooling effects of green spaces in communities like Encanto and Camelback East, in contrast to the hotter surface temperatures seen in Maryvale and Central City, where there are fewer parks and trees.
“We create these maps to be intuitive to users and help make data more accessible to the public and citizens scientists,” said Glynn Hulley, a JPL climate researcher. “We see them as a vital tool for planning effective heat interventions, such as tree planting, that can cool down the hottest roads and sidewalks.”
Homing in on Heat
At the lower right of the image is Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport, where ECOSTRESS recorded some of the hottest land surface temperatures within the city —around 140 F (60 C). The air temperature on June 19 at the airport reached 106 F (43 C).
Air temperature, which is measured out of direct sunlight, can differ significantly from the temperature at the land surface. Streets are often the hottest surfaces of the built environment due to dark asphalt paving that absorbs more sunlight than lighter-colored surfaces; asphalt absorbs up to 95% of solar radiation. These types of surfaces can easily be 40 to 60 degrees F (22 to 33 degrees C) hotter than the air temperature on a very hot day.
Launched to the International Space Station in 2018, ECOSTRESS has as its primary mission the identification of plants’ thresholds for water use and water stress, giving insight into their ability to adapt to a warming climate. But the instrument is also useful for documenting other heat-related phenomena, like patterns of heat absorption and retention.
To produce the image of Phoenix, scientists used a machine learning algorithm that incorporates data from additional satellites: NASA/USGS Landsat and Sentinel-2. The combined measurements were used to “sharpen” the surface temperatures to a resolution of 100 feet (30 meters) by 100 feet (30 meters).
More About the Mission
JPL built and manages the ECOSTRESS mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
More information about ECOSTRESS is available here: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov/.
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
Written by Sally Younger
2024-096
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Last Updated Jul 02, 2024 Related Terms
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