Sanba was most powerful typhoon of the season so far. It slammed the Japanese island of Okinawa early Sunday morning, September 16, 2012 with damaging winds reaching equivalent of Category 3 hurricane strength. Heavy torrential rains with rainfall rates well exceeding
A newly released image from NASA shows off our home planet from an unfamiliar angle — our iconic blue marble, snapped by a satellite that circles the Arctic, is arrayed in frosty white. This latest portrait of Earth from NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite puts the icy
Russian officials announced that twenty-one forest fires were burning on May 17 on a total of over 3,000 hectares, with 2,600 hectares blazing in Buryatia and almost 500 hectares in Khabarovsk territory. Three new fires were seen in Tunkinsky National Park in the past
As part of the Pacific Volcanic Ring, the remote and beautiful Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Russia holds more than 300 volcanoes, and twenty-nine of them are currently active. Of all the volcanoes on Kamchatka, Shiveluch is the most active – indeed, it is one of
Dust from the White Sands dune field in New Mexico rises thousands of feet from the valley floor and drifts over the snowy peaks of the Sacramento Mountains driven by southwesterly winter winds. White Sands National Monument lies in the 50 kilometer (31 mile) wide
An intense dust storm formed over Western China’s Taklimakan Desert on April 23, 2012. Sitting inside the Tarim Basin, the Taklimakan Desert is the warmest, driest, largest desert in China, and it ranks among the world’s largest shifting-sand deserts. Sand dunes
In late April 2012, dust mingled with clouds over the eastern Russian Federation. The dust likely originated along the border between China and Mongolia and followed a counter-clockwise arc into eastern Russia. Fires along the China-Mongolia border may also have
The irregular southeastern coastline of Kamchatka provokes large, circular eddy currents to spin off from the main southwestward-flowing Kamchatka current. Three such eddies are observed by the International Space Station (ISS) as the winter season blankets
The shallow Yellow Sea, which has a number of busy ports, usually sees 50 foggy days a year; some weather stations in the area have measured fog on up to 80 days. One of those days was March 28, 2012, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on
A few weeks ago, NASA’s Terra satellite flew over East Antarctica and detected swirls of green amidst the ice off the Princess Astrid Coast. For three weeks since, scientists have been trying to figure out what Terra saw in this remote region of the world’s
