Contest category: Thematic Imagery Application areas: Environmental, Journalism / Publishing, Restaurants / Entertainment Description: This 3D rendering of the earth is featuring data from MODIS sensor onboard NASA’s TERRA spacecraft.
The image was created using the Blue Marble dataset (Stockli et al., 2002) found at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/ and shows our planet as an integral and seamless composite of three ecosystem layers, the land, ocean and the atmosphere:
- The land surface in true color with its vegetation covered and deserted areas together with snow areas in high latitudes and in elevated terrain.
- The ocean as a false color SST visualization, red colors are warm water areas and blueish colors show cold water areas.
- The atmosphere is visualized by rendering a single day snapshot of the earth’s clouds in 3D space, with the height derived from the cloud’s top temperature and the transparency derived from the cloud’s reflectance in the visible spectrum
The image as well as the used datasets at global 1km resolution…
Geographic location: Full globe rendering, centered at North and South America Image resolution: 1km (maximum), 3D Rendering at approximately 4km spatial resolution Source of imagery: MODIS Land Surface Reflectance, Sea Ice, Snow Cover, Ocean SST, Cloud Cover, Cloud Height Commercial image processing software used: IDL, Maya on Linux Image processing technique employed: Land & Ocean: Compositing 3 months of Land surface reflectance data. Sea Ice: 8 days composite. Clouds: One day composite — Reto Stöckli (rstockli@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Switzerland |
