The Climate Connections of a Record Fire Year in the U.S. West
By Alan Buis,
NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Smoke from wildfires shrouded the San Francisco Bay Area and blocked sunlight on September 9, 2020. Credit: Aaron Maizlish/Flickr/CC BY 2.0
The year 2020 will be remembered for many things, not the least of which were a series of devastating fires around the globe that bear the fingerprints of climate change. From Australia and South America’s Amazon and Pantanal regions, to Siberia and the U.S. West, wildfires set new records and made news year-round.
It was an especially bad year for wildfires on the U.S. West Coast. Five of California’s 10 largest wildfires on record happened in 2020, and the state set a new record for acres burned. According to CAL FIRE, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, more than 9,600 wildfires burned nearly 4.2 million acres through mid-December, causing more than 30 fatalities and damaging or destroying nearly 10,500 s
Nasa’s Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely inside a vast crater.
NASA-Funded Network Tracks the Recent Rise and Fall of Ozone-Depleting Pollutants
Pollution hanging over eastern China in February of 2004. Image courtesy the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.
By Lara Streiff s
NASA s Goddard Space Flight Center
A short-lived resurgence in the emission of ozone-depleting pollutants in eastern China will not significantly delay the recovery of Earth’s protective “sunscreen” layer, according to new research published Feb. 10 in Nature.
Stratospheric ozone, also known as Earth’s ozone layer, helps shield us from the Sun’s harmful Ultraviolet (UV) rays. Compounds like CFC-11 (Trichlorofluoromethane, also known as Freon-11), a chemical once considered safe and widely used as a refrigerant and in the production of insulation for buildings, rise to the stratosphere after emission on Earth’s surface. Once in the atmosphere, CFCs are broken down by the UV light and result in the destruction of ozone molecules,
Now NASA/JPL is elevating their game even further with the development of an upcoming 3D mapping space telescope that will be capable of scanning the entire sky to study the rapid expansion of the universe following the big bang, the makeup of fledgling planetary systems, and the history of a dizzying array of galaxies.
Credit: NASA/JPL
This advanced orbital observatory named SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) is now inching its way up the design ladder and is another step closer to an official test launch by clearing developmental hurdles and entering into mission Phase C.
so nasa has its sights set on mars in 2020. the space agency planning to launch a new rover onto the red planet next summer. they want to pave the way for us, the first humans. an up close look at how it will work. i m here inside the clean room at jpl. behind me arguably the most tricked out vehicle in the solar system, the mars 2020 rover. among the new features on this rover, the terrain relative navigation. if you see that red triangle, the camera in there is going to be taking images of mars as it parachutes down into a crater.