It’s Saturday and meteorological Fall begins on September 1st. For me and many excited fans, that means college football has started. In fact, I am writing this contribution a few hours before my daughter and I head to Atlanta to watch the Georgia Bulldogs play the Clemson Tigers. As football fans celebrate the return of our beloved game day rituals, I wanted to share a fun online tool that can spell out the name of your favorite team (or even your own name) using Earth imagery gathered from a NASA satellite.
Andrew Revkin is a well-known science and environmental journalist. While browsing social media, I saw his post mentioning an interactive NASA tool that can be used to spell your name using Earth imagery from the Landsat satellite. Since the first full weekend of college football started this week, I decided to spell the nicknames of my two favorite teams. “Go Dawgs” (above) represents the University of Georgia where I have been a professor for eighteen years. “Go Noles” (below) is a nod to my three-time alma mater Florida State University.
As cool as the “Your Name in Landsat” tool is, it highlights a very important mission and contribution to society. NASA’s website says, “The NASA/USGS Landsat Program provides the longest continuous space-based record of Earth’s land in existence.” Satellites in the series have provided observations for over fifty years. Because of the program’s value to science and society, subsequent missions are planned. Landsat Next will follow the current Landsat 9. Landsat program is a part of the broader NASA Earth Sciences program. I spent twelve years of my career at NASA working on satellite missions to study precipitation and hurricanes from space. NASA cares about this planet too.
NASA’s website goes on to note, “Land imaging from moderate-resolution Earth-observing satellites, such as Landsat, offer the critical and irreplaceable capability to observe land use and land cover change across global, national, and regional scales.” For example, the images below are Landsat images showing Atlanta in 1973 (top) and 2020 (bottom), respectively. Urban land cover change is evident. My research over the years has studied how such changes impact temperature, rainfall, and flooding.
The U.S. Geological Survey, which distributes the data, provides important context. Their website points out, “Landsat is an essential capability that enables the U.S. Department of the Interior to wisely manage Federal lands. People around the world are using Landsat data for research, business, education, and other activities.”
Go try the tool and share your results with the world too.
