The Glory of the New Year

The Glory of the New Year

On December 21, 2013—the summer or winter solstice, depending on your hemisphere—the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this natural-color image. Off the Pacific coast of Peru, a rainbow-like optical effect known as a “glory” added a splash of color amidst the gray and white fluff of marine stratocumulus clouds.

For viewers on or near Earth’s surface, glories are occasionally visible as concentric rings of color in thin clouds or in fog. They appear in the opposite direction from the Sun as light is scattered backwards (diffraction) through airborne water droplets toward the viewer. The ring is centered around a point or shadow.

acquired December 21, 2013

acquired December 21, 2013

A similar phenomenon is sometimes visible from space, though a quick look at Earth Observatory’s image archivesshows that space-viewed glories are not necessarily circular. To acquire images like the one above, the MODIS instrument scans the Earth in swaths perpendicular to the path of the satellite. The swaths are horizontal cross sections through the rings of the glory, so it appears instead as two elongated bands of color that run parallel to the path of the satellite.

acquired December 21, 2013

acquired December 21, 2013

The clouds in this image “are pretty good example of ‘closed cell’ marine stratocumulus,” writes Joe Munchak, an atmospheric scientist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “These are typified by large regions of weak ascending air (forming the clouds) surrounded by narrow regions of descending air—the thin lines of clear air or thinner clouds surrounding the cells.”

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Michael Carlowicz.

Instrument: Terra – MODIS
GeoTIFF Image can be downloaded from: http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/82000/82746/glory_tmo_2013355_geo.tif
Source: NASA Earth Observatory
Categories: Remote Sensing

About Author

GIS Resources

GIS Resources is an initiative of Spatial Media and Services Enterprises with the purpose that everyone can enrich their knowledge and develop competitiveness. GIS Resources is a global platform, for latest and high-quality information source for the geospatial industry, brings you the latest insights into the developments in geospatial science and technology.

Write a Comment

Your e-mail address will not be published.
Required fields are marked*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.