Animated maps of seasonal Earth

Jul 9, 2019

As you might expect, NASA collects a lot of data, and much of it is seasonal. Eleanor Lutz animated a few maps to show the detail:

To show a few examples, the NASA Earth Observations website includes data on seasonal fire incidence (1), vegetation (2), solar insolation, or the amount of sunlight (3), cloud fraction (4), ice sheet coverage (5), and processed satellite images (6). My own map (7) combines the ice sheet data and the Blue Marble satellite images (6). The NEO database also has many more interesting datasets not shown here, like rainfall, chlorophyll concentration, or Carbon Monoxide.

Check out the final result. And, if you want to make your own, Lutz published her code on GitHub.

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