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Climate Change

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What is climate change? A definition from the Department of Ecology of Washington State reads: Climate includes patterns of temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind and seasons. It affects more than just a change in the weather and refers to seasonal changes over a long period of time. These climate patterns play a fundamental role in shaping natural ecosystems, and the human economies and cultures that depend on them.

It may be used inter-changably with global warming as they’re closely related. Global warming causes climates to change. Here is NASA discussion on the two terms, What's In A Name?

We recommend you listen and learn which is the best advice we can give to begin to understand the challenges before us.

Curated by mokiethecat

One Year on Earth as Seen From 1 Million Miles
Published on Jul 20, 2016

On July 20, 2015, NASA released to the world the first image of the sunlit side of Earth captured by the space agency's EPIC camera on NOAA's DSCOVR satellite. The camera has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its orbit at Lagrange point 1, approximately 1 million miles from Earth, where it is balanced between the gravity of our home planet and the sun.

EPIC takes a new picture every two hours, revealing how the planet would look to human eyes, capturing the ever-changing motion of clouds and weather systems and the fixed features of Earth such as deserts, forests and the distinct blues of different seas. EPIC will allow scientists to monitor ozone and aerosol levels in Earth’s atmosphere, cloud height, vegetation properties and the ultraviolet reflectivity of Earth.

The primary objective of DSCOVR, a partnership between NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Air Force, is to maintain the nation’s real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities, which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of space weather alerts and forecasts from NOAA.

For more information about DSCOVR, visit: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/DSCOVR/

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Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Kayvon Sharghi

This video is public domain and along with other supporting visualizations can be downloaded from the Scientific Visualization Studio here. 


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