Keller, Schmid, Myernick enter National Soccer Hall of Fame

SEATTLE (AP) Kasey Keller was able to suppress his emotions. Sigi Schmid fought breaking down throughout his acceptance speech.

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A Blue Blood Moon

This sharp telescopic snapshot caught late September's Harvest Moon completely immersed in Earth's dark umbral shadow, at the beginning of a total lunar eclipse. It was the final eclipse in a tetrad, a string of four consecutive total lunar eclipses. A dark apparition of the Full Moon near perigee, this total eclipse's color was a deep blood red, the lunar surface reflecting light within Earth's shadow filtered through the lower atmosphere. Seen from a lunar perspective, the reddened light comes from all the sunsets and sunrises around the edges of a silhouetted Earth. But close to the shadow's edge, the limb of the eclipsed Moon shows a distinct blue hue. The blue eclipsed moonlight is still filtered through Earth's atmosphere though, originating as rays of sunlight pass through layers high in the upper stratosphere, colored by ozone that scatters red light and transmits blue. via NASA http://ift.tt/1WDpRKr

Visualizations: A NASA Eye View of Our Earth

This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: http://ift.tt/1OKWxQV. Nearly every time I give a talk at the Hyperwall — a genius NASA creation which combines 9 to 15 high definition screens together to show amazing visualizations, pictures, movies and more — I always like to start with the GEOS-5 model of aerosols. This visualization shows how different types of aerosols (black and organic carbon, sea salt, dust, and sulfates) move around our planet. From this mesmerizing movie, you can see where dust storms originate from the Sahara, where fires in the Amazon are spewing black carbon into the atmosphere and how sea salt is spiraling around the southern oceans in huge bands. The funny thing is that this visualization has very little to do with my own research... I just think it is really cool and most people agree with me! By getting them engaged through this visualization, they quickly see how our Earth system is interconnected and how a dust storm over China could actually impact them in their own backyards in the U.S. As a scientist, I always get excited when someone asks me about my work with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. Usually when I start describing how the GPM Core satellite measures rainfall and why it's important, I do a lot of hand waving. Sometimes I try to describe what we can do with satellites with a metaphor or two. Those are all helpful in painting a picture. But what really seems to make the point is when I pull up a particular visualization of a dozen or so different satellites all taking precipitation measurements over the globe within the same 3-hour window. With a short movie you can see how we can get a global picture of rain and snow everywhere around the world within a few hours! Another thing visualizations can do is to take you into a place where you will never be able to go... like inside a hurricane! Imagine if you could see a storm from the inside out. Planes can fly above them and people who are at the wrong place and wrong time can feel a hurricane's force on the ground, but what about when the storm is growing off the coast of Africa? Or when it's changing from a small cluster of thunderstorms into a Category 3 storm with an eye visible from the International Space Station? Satellites can provide us with the key measurements that tell us where the storm is, how much rain is falling, and the data that are used in hurricane forecast models to estimate where the storms may go. But a visualization of that data can introduce that storm to the public. The visualization makes anyone a hurricane explorer, taking them inside the hurricane to see the intense rainfall in the eye wall and the spiraling rain bands from the comfort of their own home. A final thing I want people to know about visualizations is that they don't happen in the click of a mouse. Professional visualization teams agonize over converting gigabytes of satellite data into a 10 second visualization or argue about how to show the hurricane's "best side." I've seen (well, more participated in) lively discussions between scientists and visualizers about what color scheme to use and what satellite overpass shows the sheer power of the storm. This is what makes NASA so great. I can sit next to a world-renowned hurricane expert, a highly skilled visualizer and a satellite data provider, and we can all work together (and argue) to tell a compelling story to the public through a visualization. If you are interested in any or all parts of that story, from data management to Earth science to visualization, here are my recommendations: 1) Make sure to take math and science classes; 2) Try computer programming and maybe art or graphic design; 3) Lastly, seek out ways to get involved with NASA and Earth science. The possibilities are endless and there are so many ways that you can get engaged with the great science, computer science and visualizations that are done inside and outside the walls of NASA. For more great visualizations about rainfall and hurricanes, be sure to check out the GPM Gallery. -- Dalia Kirschbaum, Research Physical Scientist (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) Are you a student interested in working with NASA? Check out student internships, fellowships, scholarships and other opportunities at NASA OSSI. Love hands-on science? Want to contribute real scientific data that scientists and TV meteorologists use every day? Join "CoCoRaHS", a volunteer network of weather observers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure and map precipitation (rain, hail and snow) in their local communities.

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A 3-D Look at Weather, Clouds, and Aerosols

This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: http://ift.tt/1OKWxQV. I've always been fascinated by our atmosphere. Think about it: even though we don't see it, above us is a great aerial ocean! Over time my fascination has grown from weather maps and pondering the origins of storms, to learning all about the physics that surround our everyday lives. From as early as grade school I was also very interested in computers: diagnosing errors, developing programming skills and learning all about hardware and operating systems. So you might say my interests naturally led me to a career as a NASA scientist, where I create visualizations to study the underlying factors that drive weather patterns. Visualizations help us to see the world differently and actively. Many of you have no doubt seen your homes from space using a program called Google Earth(TM). But did you know you could do a lot more with the right data? In fact I often use it to map atmospheric data in three-dimensions (3-D) around the globe. But one of the challenges I often face is that data comes from many different sources, such as NASA and NOAA satellites or ground-observation stations. This means the data is stored on computer disks all over the country and are named and organized according to different standards, requiring us to customize techniques for producing accurate visualizations in one, 3-D display of the Earth. We do this in order to analyze atmospheric relationships more easily because many weather phenomena arise from physical interactions, both horizontally and vertically, in the global circulation. A big part of atmospheric research relies on using computer models to simulate what our atmosphere will do under different conditions. A great example of this is the data used to prepare the daily weather forecast. This data originates from weather forecasting models that calculate atmospheric motions using the world's fastest supercomputers. But how do we know these forecasts are accurate? Researchers can verify a model's performance by visualizing one of the variables such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, or air pressure and then using color shading, contour curves, and wind "barbs" to graph that data. Then they overlay the observations from NASA satellites such as cloud-top imagery, cloud-top temperature, and vertical distributions of clouds and aerosols, with the graph (it can be challenging to synchronize the data display as these times usually don't match). After this process, the display confirms the model's accuracy. This method is used to study many atmospheric events, such as timing of a storm system, precipitation, or the direction of dust or smoke transport. My passion is transforming weather data into rich visualizations that allow us to see things differently or tell us a story. My favorite part is using remotely sensed NASA data to view clouds over the oceans. This is very important because ground observations are sparse to non-existent for oceans — much of the Earth's surface is covered by water. Warm oceans are what allow hurricanes to form and without this data and our visualizations, meteorologists cannot forecast the track and intensity of tropical storms — this is absolutely vital for the safety of millions of people around the world, especially those living in coastal communities. Ultimately, it's how my work impacts understanding of weather and potentially helps the rest of the world that keeps me motivated. I have been very lucky to explore our planet in a new and different way and to continually rediscover my passion for Earth science. It's been a remarkable journey — challenging, fulfilling and ever-changing — and I hope many of you choose to undertake it! -- Roman Kowch, Staff Research Scientist (SSAI/NASA Langley Research Center

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Garbage Patch Visualization Experiment

This gallery was created for Earth Science Week 2015 and beyond. It includes a quick start guide for educators and first-hand stories (blogs) for learners of all ages by NASA visualizers, scientists and educators. We hope that your understanding and use of NASA's visualizations will only increase as your appreciation grows for the beauty of the science they portray, and the communicative power they hold. Read all the blogs and find educational resources for all ages at: http://ift.tt/1OKWxQV. You may have heard of "ocean garbage patches," areas in the ocean where litter and debris concentrates. This might stir up a vivid image of large blanketed areas of trash on the ocean surface that are easy to spot. But that's not the case. Much of the debris consists of smaller pieces of plastic that are always moving and changing with the ocean currents, waves and winds. These can be difficult to see and predict. We set out to explore the processes and interactions that cause debris to flow to these patches using buoy and model data, and created a visualization based on our results. We started with data from floating, scientific buoys that NOAA has been distributing in the oceans for the last 35-years, represented in our visualization as white dots. These buoys are used to track currents, temperature and salinity, and all of this data is publicly available. In the visualization, we can speed up time to see where the buoys travelled. But because new buoys are continually released, it was hard to see where the older buoys moved. Once we cleared the map and added the starting locations of all the buoys we started to pick up on interesting patterns all over world. For example, lines of buoys began to appear along shipping and plane routes because these were the vessels used to periodically release buoys. The next step was to shift the timing of each buoy data set to release the buoys all at the same time to observe buoy migration patterns. You'll notice that the number of buoys shown decreases over time, because some buoys don't last as long as others (they either wash up on the shores of coastlines, disintegrate, sink, experience technical failure etc.) When projected onto the same visualization, we noticed that the buoys migrated to five known gyres, or locations that some call the 'ocean garbage patches,' where debris or litter accumulate in certain pockets of the ocean. We can also see this pattern in a computer model of ocean currents called ECCO-2. We released simulated particles evenly around the world, letting the modeled currents carry the particles. The particles from the model also migrate to the same five ocean garbage patches as the NOAA buoys. Even though the retimed buoys and modeled particles did not react to currents at the same times, the fact that the data tends to accumulate in the same regions helps validate the result. -- Greg Shirah, Development Lead (Earth Science-Related Visualizations), NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

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