NASA's Earth Observatory and Visible Earth: Imagery and Science on the Internet

The purpose of NASA s Earth Observatory and Visible Earth Web sites is to provide freely-accessible locations on the Internet where the public can obtain new satellite imagery (at resolutions up to a given sensor's maximum) and scientific information about our home planet. Climatic and environmental change are the sites main foci. As such, they both contain ample data visualizations and time-series animations that demonstrate geophysical parameters of particular scientific interest, with emphasis on how and why they vary over time. An Image Composite Editor (ICE) tool will be added to the Earth Observatory in October 2002 that will allow visitors to conduct basic analyses of available image data. For example, users may produce scatter plots to correlate images; or they may probe images to find the precise unit values per pixel of a given data product; or they may build their own true-color and false-color images using multi- spectral data. In particular, the sites are designed to be useful to the science community, public media, educators, and students.