Earth Day ~ A good day to Plant a Tree
Image courtesy Quickscat Science Team – NASA – copyright 2002 – all rights reserved
“The image above was taken in 2002 from NASA’s Quick Scatterometer (Quikscat). Launched June 19, 1999, Quikscat’s SeaWinds scatterometer instrument is a specialized microwave radar that continuously measures both the speed and direction of winds near the ocean surface in all weather conditions. The sensor takes approximately 400,000 measurements over 93 percent of Earth’s surface every day. The spacecraft flies at an altitude of 800 kilometers (497 miles), circling the Earth from pole to pole every 100 minutes. “
” The direction and intensity of surface winds across the Atlantic Ocean are shown in the Quickscat image above. Orange areas show where winds are blowing the hardest, while violet is an intermediate value, and blue shows relatively light winds. The SeaWinds/QuikSCAT project is managed for NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology. “
Text Source: NASA Quickscat page at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=2503
Wikipedia has an entry on what Earth Day is about.
Library of Congress has posted a list of resources for Earth Day 2008. Also see an entire list of LC Science Reference Guides at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/sci-ref-guides.html
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers a list of Greentips Podcasts and Tips to Save Energy, and a link to a pamphlet entitled “It’s Easy Being Green“.
EarthDay Network is an international site that offers many educational strategies for environmental awareness.
Grist is a blog about environmental awareness and analysis, where I found a link to a fulltext report published Apr 21 2008 from Pacific Research Institute entitled Index of Leading Environmental Indicators 2008 (81-page PDF document).
ToxTown is a very cool website run by the National Library of Medicine allowing users to search for localized environmental exposures… in English or Spanish language. A good place to start exploring this virtual community is through the ToxTown Fact Sheet.
Of special interest to epidemiologists is the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry, a division of U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services. This multi-layered website provides many sources about environmentally-caused illness in humans. On this Earth Day… here is one example: ATSDR Tox Profiles 2007.
Finally… Centers for Disease Control has a Health Alert Page and a Natural Disasters page.
1 response so far ↓
Daniel // April 24, 2008 at 9:56 AM
That is an amazing photograph!